WMT "Index Status" vs Google search site:mydomain.com

[JohnBolyard]

Hi - I'm working for a client with a manual penalty.

In their WMT account they have 2 pages indexed.If I search for "site:myclientsdomain.com" I get 175 results which is about right.

I'm not sure what to make of the 2 indexed pages - any thoughts would be very appreciated.

google-1.png google-2.png

[DennisSeymour]

Hi John!

Webmaster tools is definitely the accurate one.

Resources:

This link pretty much sums it up https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2642366?hl=en

For more information about the results it returns: http://searchengineland.com/why-google-cant-count-results-properly-53559

They normally show inaccurate numbers when site: search is used, mainly to prevent people from further learning about how they index pages.

I would also look at the sitemap you submitted there and robots.txt just to be sure that they had no reason not to index your other pages.

[JohnBolyard]

Dennis - thanks for passing along this info - very useful.

Let me read over what you've suggested - hopefully my confusion will dim!

Thanks!