Is the Google results serp broken?
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Hi everyone!
We've been trying to decipher how many of our pages are indexed by google at the moment. If we do the usual "site:https://www.hobbydb.com" search term, the serp says that we have more than 740,000 pages indexed. However, when I do a deep dive and click through to the last page of results, I can only get to page 54, and then there are no more results. This would mean that I only have 540 pages indexed, not 740,000. We have also done other queries for other sub-sections of our website, and the results also truncate at 50 pages. Has anyone run into this problem? Any suggestions are appreciated!
Best,
Alex
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That index query returns dubious results. URLProfiler wrote an excellent article last year sharing the results of some experimentation they did around the accuracy of that command and other tools used to help determine the extent of your site indexation. I recommend you give it a read - http://urlprofiler.com/blog/google-index-checker/. It will take some some work and access to their tool, but I think you'll gain a lot of insight.
Good luck!
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Michael, the site: command typically has not "worked" or provided accurate results for years now. It's just they way it is--and I don't expect Google to really give us the number of pages that are actually indexed anytime soon.
That said, typically I recommend using the site:hobbydb.com command to see the pages, and then click to the final page of results (if you can). I'm currently seeing about 766,000 pages indexed.
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Google search console Index Status report
Google Webmaster tools tell you in the
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2642366?hl=en
if you want to know without a doubt you have to connect Google Analytics to Deepcrawl it will say exactly how many URLs are in the index.
- https://www.deepcrawl.com
- https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/how-to-measure-indexed-pages-more-accurately/
- https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/how-can-non-indexable-pages-receive-google-organic-traffic/
- http://www.stateofdigital.com/40-deepcrawl-tweaks/
Now that Google Analytics can be added to screaming frog you can do something very similar.
- https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
- https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/general/#crawling
- https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/faq/
- https://moz.com/community/q/how-to-determine-which-pages-are-not-indexed
I Hope this helps,
Tom