Google Hiding Indexed Pages from SERPS?

[prima-253509]

Trying to troubleshoot an issue with one of our websites and noticed a weird discrepancy. Our site should only have 3 pages in the index. The main landing page with a contact form and two policy pages, yet google reports over 1,100 pages (that part is not a mystery, I know where they are coming from.....multi site installations of popular CMS's leave much to be desired in actually separating websites)

Here is a screen shot showing the results of the site command:

http://www.diigo.com/item/image/2jing/oseh

I have set my search settings to show 100 (the max number of results) results per page. Everything is fine until I get to page three where I get the standard "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 122 already displayed." But wait a second, I clicked on page three, now there are only two pages of results and the number of results reported has dropped to 122

http://www.diigo.com/item/image/2jing/r8c9

When I click on the "show omitted results" I do get some more results, and the returned results jumps back up to 1,100. However I only get three pages of results. And when I click on the last page the number of results returned changes to 205

http://www.diigo.com/item/image/2jing/jd4h

Is this a difference between indexes (same thing happens when I turn instant search back on, Shows over 1,100 results but when I get to the last page of results it changes to 205).

Any other way of getting this info? I am trying to go in and identify how these pages are being generated, but I have to know what ones are showing up in the index for that to happen. Only being able to access 1/5th of the pages indexed is not cool. Anyone have any idea about this or experience with it?

For reference I was going through with SEOmoz's excellent toolbar and exporting the results to csv (using the Mozilla plugin). I guess google doesn't like people doing that so maybe this is a way to protect against scraping by only showing limited results in the Site: command.

Thanks!

[AlanMosley]

I have seen this and dont have an answer, but if i were you i would put canonical tags in your pages to avoide and problems with duplicate content as thats a lot of duplicates

[prima-253509]

High Alan,

thanks for the response, I guess it is good to know that someone else has seen this issue before.

As for canonical tags, I do have them on all pages, but because there is not a way to set them absolutely (our CMS only allows for relative....so it takes the base path of the domain that it is on) I can't get them to link only to the domain that they are supposed to be published on.

Cheers!

[AlanMosley]

i see your problem, you may need to hack in and hard code the domain in the canonical tags.

[prima-253509]

Thanks Alan,

will see what we can do. One way or the other it has to be addressed.