In this article we'll discuss the historic indexing status metrics in the URL report.
What are the Historic indexing status?
The Historic indexing status metrics are set of recorded historic indexing events that are tracked for each page URL in any project.
The metrics are grouped into 5 categories:
Indexing Changes
Page Ever Indexed
Page Ever Not Indexed
Canonical Changes
Robots.txt Changes
1) Indexing Changes
Indexing Changes | Description |
Indexing Change Date | The date since the last recorded indexing change for the page URL. |
Days Since Last Indexing Change | The number of days since the last indexing change based on the indexing change date. |
Number of Indexing Changes | The total number of indexing changes recorded by our tool since the page was tracked. |
2) Page Ever Indexed
Page Ever Indexed | Description |
Page Ever Indexed | The page URL was recorded as having a Indexed status when tracked by our tool. |
Previous indexing state | The previous indexing state of the page URL if it changed. |
Indexing Change Date | The date we detected the change in the index coverage state. |
Link to GSC | The link to the URL Inspection Tool in Search Console to the previous index coverage state. |
3) Page Ever Not Indexed
Page Ever Not Indexed | Description |
Page Ever Not Indexed | The page URL was recorded as having a Not Indexed status when tracked by our tool*. |
Previous indexing state | The previous indexing state of the page URL if it changed. |
Indexing Change Date | The date we detected the change in the index coverage state. |
Link to GSC | The link to the URL Inspection Tool in Search Console to the previous index coverage state. |
Note: A page URL can have both a Page Ever Indexed and Page Ever Not Index status. In fact page URLs that fluctuate often have both historic records.
4) Canonical Changes
Canonical changes | Description |
Canonical changed? | A record of whether the page URL canonical has ever changed since being tracked by Indexing Insight. |
Date canonical changed | The timestamp of the change between the user declared canonical and Google selected canonical. |
User declared canonical | The recorded user declared canonical during the change. |
Google selected canonical | The recorded Google selected canonical during the change. |
Link to GSC | The link to the URL Inspection Tool in Search Console to the historical canonical change. |
5) Robots.txt Changes
Canonical changes | Description |
Ever blocked? | A record of when a page URL was blocked by the robots.txt file. |
Date blocked | The timestamp of when the page was blocked by the robots.txt file. |
Link to GSC | The link to the URL Inspection Tool in Search Console to the historical robots.txt changes. |
Why are the Historic indexing status useful?
The historic indexing status metrics are useful to provide historic context to page URLs.
Google indexing data is lacking in providing context and does not give historic indexing data for any page URLs.
This is where Indexing Insight comes in.
Our scheduler automatically tracks when your page URLs change index coverage states and records the historic events for every URL.
This means we can use this data to help create unique reports in Indexing Insight.
It also means at any point, you can pull up a page URL and identify if the page has ever had any changes to it that could affect its performance.
How to use Historic indexing status
The Historic indexing states metrics can be used to provide context.
If you track important pages with Indexing Insight, then the Historic indexing status metrics can be used to help debug historic indexing issues.
Instead of spending hours investigating why a page may have had performance issues, you can open the URL report to quickly identify the root cause.