Why does Google say they have more URLs indexed for my site than they really do?

[CassisGroup]

When I do a site search with Google (i.e. site:www.mysite.com), Google reports "About 7,500 results" -- but when I click through to the end of the results and choose to include omitted results, Google really has only 210 results for my site.

I had an issue months back with a large # of URLs being indexed because of query strings and some other non-optimized technicalities - at that time I could see that Google really had indexed all of those URLs - but I've since implemented canonical URLs and fixed most (if not all) of my technical issues in order to get our index count down.

At first I thought it would just be a matter of time for them to reconcile this, perhaps they were looking at cached data or something, but it's been months and the "About 7,500 results" just won't change even though the actual pages indexed keeps dropping!

Does anyone know why Google would be still reporting a high index count, which doesn't actually reflect what is currently indexed?

Thanks!

[KevinBudzynski]

It seems like you are taking the correct steps. I'm guessing those pages were tossed in to the supplementary index (as they were most likely were dupes) and I beleive by tweaking your robots.txt files, over time, these should be removed.

Another thing to do is inform Google on what to do with those parameters inside webmaster tools:

Configuration => URL parameters