Google Search Console showing too many pages being indexed

[ATShock]

Hello!

We are seeing an extremely large discrepancy between the number of total indexed pages in our search console (>100,000 URL's) and what is appearing the SERPs when using site:oursite.com (<20,000)

We notice this spike in indexed pages happened when we migrated our site to https, however when searching google and using the site: operator, only the https pages appear to be indexing.

Is there something I'm missing that may explain this large difference in numbers?

Thank you!

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi ATshock

Google returns a different number of indexed pages every time you search but your discrepancy is huge. This might help explain the difference. The live search being more accurate.

From: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/72610/number-of-indexed-pages-with-site-search-less-than-reported-in-google-webmast/87808#87808

1] In Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools), Google Index > Index Status, the number is the actual number of pages that Google has indexed from a particular site. This is a factual number.

2] In Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools), Crawl > Sitemaps, the number is the number of pages found within the sitemap that is indexed when updated last. Please know this is not real-time or even close. It is based upon audits of the sitemap which happens periodically and in short fits and spurts. For this reason, it is a misleading metric that should be explained but is not. This number rarely agrees with the number described in item 1.

3] The "About nnn results" is the number of pages within the query result set from the index that pass all of the SERP "filters". When a search query is submitted, the result sets (there are actually several queries) are combined and then submitted to filters which do several things such as ranking the results and is where SERP penalties (the less severe of the two) are applied. This number rarely agrees with the number described in item 1.

Of the three, if you want to know the number of pages a site has indexed, option 1 is the best. If you want to know the number of pages a site has indexed that currently passes the filters then option 3 with a site: search is the best. Option 3 should be almost totally ignored unless you are looking at this number often enough to get a solid feel for things. For a new site, in particular, this can be a disappointing metric simply because not all of the rank metrics for the indexed pages are calculated yet.

Any site that is new, and a site that is only 2 months old is extremely new, you should not worry about any of the metrics too much. The reason for this is simple. It takes nearly a year for a site to fully settle into the SERPs. Part of this process is assessing metrics such as click-through rate (CTR), bounce rate, time spent on page, time spent on site, etc. Add to that all of the major updates Google has made since March where Panda, in particular, is still going on and will be into next year. With all of this core algorithm disruption, the addition of RankBrain, and Panda, any site will see fluctuations, some possibly severe at times, which make it nearly impossible for anyone to assess where their site really stands for quite some time.

I advise working on your site making it the best you can and keeping your head down for a while. Do not get into the metric weeds just yet. It would not pay dividends.

Regards

Nigel

[ATShock]

Thanks for the response, Nigel!

Our site is >10 yrs old and this appears to be a recent surge in GSC, so we're mainly curious as to what would cause the number discrepancy to be so drastic. We surely don't actually have >100,000 pages on our site.

[Nigel_Carr]

Pleasure!