When I go into the Webmasters Tools in Google for my website it gives me "Indexed URLs: 305,509", but when I type in Google "site:" with my url it returns about 19.000 results. How is it possible?
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A:
Google doesnt show the amount of pages it indexes using a site: command, this is commonly observed and widely believed to be due to the fact that Google dont want you (or your competitors) seeing exactly which pages or how many are indexed.
There are also other factors involved, such as the time between indexing and ranking the pages. Quite often the pages sit in data centers for a while before they are added to all indexes (there used to be at least 50 datacenters). Also, it is widely believed that they have two main indexes, the 2nd is a supplemental index that they hardly show (pages can be buried in here).
Also, picking a bunch random pages on your site, get some unique text and put between quotes then search in Google. My guess is that you will find every single page.
Its also the same for the link: command. Its better to check this in Yahoo mostly because they show most of them.
A good place for this kind of info is WMW
Ke
2010-03-01 08:40:06
Thank you! Your answer cleared a lot of my confusion.
Claudio
2010-03-01 09:41:28