How to Check If Google is Crawling and Ranking Posts

You can check if your posts are ranking with these 4 basic methods

The obvious way to know if Google is already ranking your blog/posts is if you're experiencing some organic traffic lately. That's what every content writers want to achieve.

But if you're using other traffic sources like the Facebook page, email subscriptions, Twitter, and the likes, it may be hard to track how well your posts are ranking organically. 

The question is how can you tell? How can you find out if a post you wrote a few weeks ago is now accepted by Google as something worth ranking? How can you say if Google has crawled those posts at all?

This piece presents a layman technique I'd fallen in love with and three others you might have known but never taken advantage of. I used these methods to quickly see if something was wrong with my posts or if things were well with the organic sources.

More importantly, this is not a post aiming at selling you a dozen of tools to check posts' ranking. You only need a few basic things in SEO to achieve the BIG result.

1. Copy and Search the Title

If you're in a very competitive niche, it's truly hard to rank on page one in just one day or two. It doesn't work like that. Unless no one has ever written what you covered, you couldn't see your posts on page one that quick.

If you follow my guide on writing a post that ranks higher than others, you can be favored here though. Yet, that's not promising some sort of magic.

So, how do you know if, at least, the post you dropped a few days ago, is gradually seeing the light of day? 

Copy the post title and search for it, word for word, on Google, Bing, Yahoo search, and similar search engines.

With this, check the results and see if it's on pages one, two, three, or four. 

Don't get tired of checking to around page ten (if the available results are up to that).

I've done this in the past and found my posts on pages 3 or 4. This is a good sign in a competitive niche. This gives me the hope that in a few weeks, the post may be on page one. Seeing your post on page 1 or 2 within this period is really "wow". However, that may not mean its permanent position unless no one else will beat it in a few days. 

If however, you check the entire title but could not find yourself on pages 1 to 10 or anywhere, something is really wrong. I'd experienced this too. So, relax and let me show you what to do about it.

My observation, in most cases, is that search engines might have not even crawled the post - not to say making an attempt to rank it. This is why it is advisable if you want to use this method, to wait up to a week before you can conclude that the post has not been crawled or ranked at all.

This is why you must read this post, "How to Force Google To Crawl and Rank Your Posts. In brief, the post is about reposting the content again and again until you start seeing the results.

If you repost, spiders might recrawl it and give it the position it's due in the search results.

It works!

2. Copy and Search a Major Part of the Content

Similar to the method above, you can check if google had recently crawled your posts by copying a brick or block of words (such as paragraphs) in the main content and searching on Google or any search engines.

This will relieve you of the stress if after checking with the entire title, there was no sign of crawling or ranking.

In most cases, this will bring your post among the search results if it has been crawled and ranked but not well ranked to page one.

If this doesn't work, obviously search engines have failed to completely crawl your content. It's equally possible that your post was an exact repetition of other well-ranked posts.

In this case, I don't only recommend reposting your content, you may need to rewrite it and avoid repeating what other authority blogs had covered.

Google has been reported to have said, if your post is not unique, its bot might have no reason to rank it even if it's crawled.

3. Check Your Traffic Source for the "Search Keywords"

In the blogger platform, for instance, publishers can see the list of the most-earning keywords. You can see those keywords pulling traffic to your website very recently. Other content publishing platforms such as WordPress have the same utility.

This may be the way to track your ranking for new posts if you'd not written many posts in the past.

For those who had dropped up to hundreds of well-ranked posts, it may be difficult to see keywords related to your new posts appearing on page one. Hence, navigate to other pages to see if you have traffic for the posts.

If this is not available, you can use Google Console (or webmaster) to know what searchers/visitors are looking for and what they were being taken to your pages for.

Then, you may use the next method.

4. Use Google Console/Webmasters

This is primarily a platform to see those keywords taking people to your blog. With this, you can see which posts those keywords are ranking for.

Google Webmaster page showing the keywords and performance.

Check to see if the new posts, you're tracking, have their keywords searched and ranked for lately.

Conclusion

Most times, we tend to jump to the conclusion that our posts are not ranking. The best thing to do is to verify that first. Things may not be as quick as we want. Yet, that doesn't mean they're not working.

If we find out the truth about posts being looked down on by search engines, then, we should know what to do next.

Are you using any of these methods to check crawling and ranking? Are there other ways you can suggest for the same results? Leave a comment below.