What's happening with the Google Index?

[seorocks]

Hi Team.

I have been checking 30+ sites and they all have the same experience - amazing numbers in the index - some are just not possible, simply because we dont have that number of pages any way. Have you seen something similar with the Google index?

SEOrocks.

[inertia]

I have been checking 30+ sites and they all have the same experience - amazing numbers in the index - some are just not possible, simply because we dont have that number of pages any way. Have you seen something similar with the Google index?

Are you sure these arent old pages that are no longer around? Google tends to keep URLS of pages for ages (rhymes - he he!). So any page that they have indexed for that domain (right from the start of it's life) will probably keep appearing in site searches, GWT etc for years to come.

[danlefree]

There is some truth the the missing content issue, particularly when considered in the context of the Index Wars (i.e. search companies competing to have the largest indexes) - I know I've seen occasions in which a site: operator search's results were far fewer than stated to begin with when one arrived at the abrupt conclusion of results on page 12 of the SERP.


Case in point:

• site: (Page 1) shows Results 1 - 10 of about 49
• site: (Page 5) - shows Results 41 - 45 of 45

Whether this owes to the activity which inertia is describing or not (I know this particular site has seen a few redesigns in its time and should report far more than 49 results if the premise that old links are counted holds) is up to you to experiment with to your own satisfaction... I don't buy into the total figures displayed on page one of the SERP's.


It doesn't matter how many results Google claims to have, however, because...

Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query. (You asked for results starting from 1000.)

[wige]

The count that is shown is almost never accurate, unless you have only a dozen or so pages indexed. The count is a rough estimate of matches, which is calculated using a different database query than what is used to generate the search results, to minimize the processing impact on the database engine. For example, filtering, canonicalization fixes, duplicate content filters, new crawls, and many other factors that influence what appears in the actual results pages are not taken into account.

[seoconsult1]

First the count which you see is not 100% accurate.
Second some of the site not remove his old pages so its also show here.
3rd some not block there session id pages via robots so its indexed.
4th some pages cache duplicate like with www or without www or root/directory and root/Directory.

These are the reason which also indexed by Google so result show us too much pages. In few sites images also indexed as URL.

[AustinG]

The pages you see in a Google search may have even been removed from the website and Google has not yet done its rounds of checking to know if they are broken links or not.