Site: on Google

[Artience]

Hello, people.

I have a quick question regarding search in Google.

I use search operator [site:url] to see indexing stauts of my site.

Today, I was checking indexing status and I found that Google shows different numbers of indexed pages depends on search setting.

1. At default setting (set as 10 search result shows)

> I get about 150 pages indexed by Google.

2. I set 100 results shows per page and tried again.

> I get about 52 pages indexed by Google.

Of course I used same page URL.

I really want to know which data is accurate. Please help people!!

[HiveDigitalInc]

Neither of the results are accurate as they are both representative of sampling and estimations made by Google, which is doing its best to find your site's pages out of the trillions of URLs they have indexed.

If you are just trying to get a general count of how many pages Google knows about, I would try this...

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:yoursite.com+inurl:yoursite.com&filter=0

just replace yoursite.com in the URL with your actual domain name (make sure you do it both times).

[john4math]

I'm not sure why Google's results would depend on how many results you're showing, but if either setting shows a URL, then it must be indexed, right?

Also of note, if you're interested in getting indexed in Bing too, I'd recommend setting up their webmaster tools as you can submit 10 URLs a day, and up to 50 URLs a month, to be indexed if Bing hasn't indexed your site yet.

[Darroch]

It does seem that the numbers change for different numbers of results, but as Russ mentioned, they are indications/estimates.

What I'd be more interested in is which pages Google Webmaster Tools knows about from your sitemap.xml (since these are the pages that you consider important). With a larger site you could also split your sitemaps into sections to give easier analysis of which sections are poorly indexed.

For more resources on URL parameters:

http://searchengineland.com/google-power-user-tips-query-operators-48126

http://searchengineland.com/google-power-user-tips-serp-url-parameters-49736

[KeriMorgret]

The site: and other results are often just estimates that get refined when you put in additional information or change the parameters.

If you left your search displaying ten results and went to the next page, you'd likely have a change in the total number of results displayed. This will happen (or at least did) happen on Bing as well.

Google does give some more accurate data if you verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools. If you verify your site and submit a sitemap, you can see how many URLs are indexed out of how many you submitted for that map.

Another way to judge what's in the index is go to your analytics program, look at organic traffic from Google, and look at the URLs that are receiving organic traffic.

[Artience]

Thanks for sharing your tip.