WebPosition has a URL Verification feature in the Reporter. If WebPosition reports your URL (i.e., page) as not found in the search engine, this generally means that your page has simply not been indexed yet by that search engine. It can take weeks for some engines to add your page to their index after you submit to them. (Note: URLs are reported as found or not found on the Summary and Detail reports only).
Since many search engines do not provide a way to accurately search for a URL, WebPosition will instead search for a "unique phrase" that would only be found on your page and possibly a handful of others. WebPosition will perform an EXACT search for that phrase and then will scan the first 30 matches by default for your URL in the results. If it finds your URL in the first 30 matches, it will report the URL as found. If your phrase returns more than 30 matches, then the possibility still exists that your page is in the index, but is further down the search list. That's why it's important that your unique phrase is truly unique on the Web.
For WebPosition to accurately report whether your URL exists, you must make sure you adhere to several important rules when adding the URLs to the URL verification tab:
1. After you type in the name of the page you want to verify, then you must add some unique text on the page that is likely to be found only on your page and not on any others on the Internet. Sometimes this can be your e-mail or company name, but often these can be found elsewhere on the Web and thereby do not work well by themselves. Use the Select button to highlight a longer phrase from the page that would not be common.
2. Make sure the unique phrase you select does not include any HTML tags.
3. Make sure you do not chop off characters at the end of your unique phrase. For example, if the last word in your unique phrase was "shoppers" and you accidentally chopped off the "s" then some engines would not find your page!
4. Make sure that your phrase is unique enough that it returns 30 or less matches. (Click on the view actual results link next to the URL not found message to count the matches that came back. If it's returning more than 30 then you need to refine your unique phrase so its more "unique." Or, you could try searching for more than 30 matches (Options Tab) to scan further down in the results. This will lengthen the time for your mission to complete though.
5. Make sure you are selecting VISIBLE text for your unique phrase. Do not select text in the meta tags, alt tags, etc. since many engines will not find text in non-visible areas of the page.
6. If you see your page in the search results, but WebPosition reports it as not found, then double check that the URL displayed on the URL Verification tab exactly matches what the search engine displays.
If you are certain that your have your URL verification report setup properly and have still not become indexed in the time you expected, then see our article regarding reasons why you may not be indexed.
If you still have questions or problems after reading the above, let us know . If you've followed all the above advice and you feel the URL Verification report may be inaccurate, e-mail the mission file and details on what you feel is inaccurate and why to help@webposition.com.
