For many webmasters and SEOs – “Not Selected” was a great option in Google Webmaster Tools to analyze the health status of the website.
Now it is no more. Since today morning dt. Feb 8, 2013, Google has removed this nifty little feature.
Introduced in June 2012, this option can be accessed by: Webmaster Tools –> Health –> Index Status –> Advanced –> Not Selected
INDEX STATUS: It tells how many of your URLs Google able to crawled and indexed at different time periods, for last one year.
It shows data about – total indexed, ever crawled, blocked by robots, removed and not selected. As crawling and indexing are two important aspects of a website, these data provides valuable information about the overall health condition of the site.
Not selected means “URLs from your site that redirect to other pages or URLs whose contents are substantially similar to other pages.”
High number of not selected means – lots of pages of your site are either duplicate or near duplicate due to canonicalization, duplicate content, or automatically generated pages. It may also possible if the site is hacked.
So a sudden spike in the number of duplicate content means – problems with site configuration, redirects, or security.
WordPress Blogs: The most famous, and most used CMS for blogging as well as website produces lots of duplicate content, many a times. It automatically produces multiple URLs for the same content under category, tags, archives etc.
And not selected was a great help for bloggers to know the health status of their WordPress powered blogs.
REASON: There is a lots of chatter going on in Google Webmaster Forum about the reason behind removing the not selected feature from Webmaster Tools.
And the only reason – It was creating lot of confusion to all the users of Google WMT.
Add your views about the removal of not selected option from WMT in the comments below.
About Nandita B.
My name is Nandita B, and I’m a SEO practitioner and part-time blogger. My sheer passion for sharing knowledge a webmaster needs drove me to create “A Webmaster’s Magazine” called SEOHour.com
Loading ...
Nandita, What stupid act.. Many of my domain linkings to me were removed from the list in webmaster tools… But i see that the links are still there and they are not at all spam…
Can you help what the stupid act is going on inside the Big G
SAJID recently posted…Top 10 Best Real Time Strategy Games
Nandita,not sure what to say.. it looks that sometimes (or most of the times?) Google are doing crazy things and jungle updates… either because they know pretty well what they\’re doing, and want the benefit of their users, or just experimenting, and they crave for extra publicity… maybe both? LOL
John recently posted…Where to Find Some of the Best Affiliate Marketing eBooks
in short nut we can say “URLs from our site that redirect to other pages or URLs whose contents are substantially similar to other pages.”but it is not too easy to find the duplicate pages on the available siites
Google must have a valid reason for deleting this option. I hope they’ll explain this to everyone.
Sarah Park recently posted…How to Increase Online Sales
Well Nandita you know that Google is a Boss and Boss is always right.
Mohsin Ali recently posted…50+ Google Adsense Alternatives in 2013