Skip to main content

Did Google visit your website today?

I'm always curious to know how often Googlebot is visiting my website. I get maximum traffic from Google Search Engine, so it becomes very important that Googlebot pays frequent visits to my website and indexes maximum number of pages. Googlebot is Google's web-crawling robot. It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the search engine.

Since this blog is hosted on Blogger, I do not have any access to their webserver logs and the only way to find out if Google visited my site is check the date on Google Cache.

But looks like there exists a better way of doing things - I just came across an undocumented but very powerful syntax called "daterange" - Google did mention it in the API documentation but very few know about it.

Remember: A date-range search has nothing to do with the creation date of the content and everything to do with the indexing date of the content. And this is exactly what I was looking for.

If you want to limit your results to documents that were published within a specific date range, then you can use the "daterange:" query term to accomplish this. The "daterange:" query term must be in the following format: daterange:<start_date>-<end date>

where <start_date> = Julian date indicating the start of the date range
<end date> = Julian date indicating the end of the date range

The catch is that the date must be expressed as a Julian date that is calculated by the number of days since January 1, 4713 BC. For example, the Julian date for August 1, 2001 is 2452122. You can use this online tool to Convert calendar date to Julian Date

This simple form allows you to do a date range search using google. Rather than constructing fancy queries such as " life daterange:2453461-2453491", simply put in the # of days back. e.g. if you want to do a search for life in the past 20 days, type in life in the query box and 20 in the days back box.

I used the query below to find the pages on my site that were indexed by Google a day before.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://labnol.blogspot.com%20daterange:2453517-2453518

The number of results retrieved are actually the number of files that were indexed by Google yesterday.

And don't forget that there are a few simple things you can do to help the Googlebot understand your web site as fully as possible. Read this great article at Scribbling.net.

Popular posts from this blog

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts for Power Users

All features in Mozilla Firefox browser are accessible through the use of the keyboard. You can use shortcut keys to view and save Web pages, search the web, open new webpages, work with bookmarks, or find text on the current webpage. Some of the most common keyboard shortcuts in Mozilla Firefox are Ctrl+N (to open a new Firefox window), Ctrl+T (to open a new tab), Ctrl+F4 (to close the current tab) and Ctrl+S to save the current webpage. Mozilla Firefox supports many more powerful keyboard shortcuts. For instance, by pressing a simple key combination, you can manually delete autocomplete entries from the Firefox location bar or Web forms. I am sharing a list of my favorite Mozilla Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts that make web browsing with Firefox even more fun . And you also save your precious time as navigating through several layers of Firefox Toolbar menus is no longer necessary. 1. Web Search Ctrl+K moves the cursor to the Search Bar. You can then type in the terms you wish to fin

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.