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PIP: Percentage of Indexed Pages by Google
I've heard a lot lately about PIP (Percentage of Indexed Pages).  PIP essentially refers to how many of your total website Google has actually indexed and includes in their search results.  Yes, while Google indexes all/most of your pages it will "omit" some for one reason or another.  Ever wonder what pressing that "ommitted results" link at the bottom of your search results would show?  Those are the pages Google is suppressing in the search results because it thinks they are irrelevent to your search or appear to have repeated content.

Want to see the pages Google is omitting from your site?

Use RSS Pieces free Google Supressed Pages Tool

Some people suggest that PIP is the all important ratio for determining if a site is "successful" on the web.  I, and much of the web development community beg to differ.  And to prove my point from an unbiased perspective, I will show you that while RSS Pieces has an extremely high PIP at 90%, I also have worlds more traffic than my competitor, Jim Cronin's site Real Estate Tomato that has an extremely low PIP.  Both sites are successful on the web meaning they both drive tons of traffic and generate quality leads daily.  In fact, you've probably visited one or both of the sites recently.

Compare RSS Pieces and Tomato Traffic:
Alexa Traffic Comparison

How to determine your PIP:

• Go to Google, run a site:www.yourdomainname.com.  When you get the results, click "next" and go to the end of your results.  On the very last page of your results you will see numbers in the upper right hand corner.  It will say results x of y total results. 

For example, this is the last page of RSS Pieces included results:  it shows that of the 342 pages Google indexed, it displays 313 results.  Meaning Google has chosen to omit 29 of our pages for some reason or another.  My PIP = 313/342 = 91.5%

JC's results from a site query are here.  Only 6 of Jim's 153 pages are included in the Google results pages which puts his PIP at 3.9%. 

According to some logic, RSS Pieces should appear higher in the Search Engine Results pages and drive substantially more traffic than the Tomato, however, this simply isn't true.  PIP is not an indicator of a website's success.  Traffic and lead generation are what determine a website's success and those numbers are directly related to how good the content is on the page.  Both Jim and I drive substantial traffic to our sites because we consistently put out quality content.  We do not populate our sites with tons of RSS feeds from various sources, we subscribe to the theory that unique relevant information is what people want and we are winning the traffic wars.

Conclusion: Do not be fooled by dressed up metrics of PIP.  Be sure to use the metrics the rest of web community uses when determining your site's success... traffic and leads. 

For more information about meausring your website traffic read:
Measuring and boosting traffic in 1 hour/day

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