Quick question: Is historical Google index data available?
A friend asked me if his now non-existent website was ever indexed.
Many thanks
aakk9999
11:43 am on May 21, 2015 (gmt 0)
As far as I know, Google's historical index data is not available (yes, I am sure they have it, no, we cannot access it).
A friend asked me if his now non-existent website was ever indexed.
To clarify, do you mean the website does not exist now, but it used to exist before? If so, how long was on line before? Could he check wayback machine?
eleventy
2:56 pm on May 21, 2015 (gmt 0)
Hi, and thanks :)
That's right, the website used to exist but not now.
Yes good plan re. wayback machine. Just checked and it there are indeed snapshots. Does this mean that it was indexed by google? Or just confirm that wayback did a snapshot?
netmeg
3:31 pm on May 21, 2015 (gmt 0)
Just the snapshot. I don't know of any way (short of logfiles) to tell if something was indexed in the past.
aakk9999
4:07 pm on May 21, 2015 (gmt 0)
If you have found it on wayback machine (= it was long enough live for wayback to find it) and if robots.txt did not explicitly block Googlebot, then I am pretty certain it was at least crawled by Google in the past and it is very likely to have been indexed.
eleventy
4:41 pm on May 21, 2015 (gmt 0)
yep, makes sense. Thanks guys
LostOne
9:53 pm on May 21, 2015 (gmt 0)
They had one many moons ago. I forget what year. Maybe 2004 or that time period where they showed results from a period in 2000 for a limited period of time. Be nice to see the good ole days when the web was a peaceful frontier.
