lucy24 - 7:31 pm on Jul 25, 2012 (gmt 0)

clicking on the "learn more" link results in a Page Not Found message

Which one? The 'learn more' link from the question mark next to "total indexed" on Index Status, or in the grey text under the graph (same link) currently takes me to

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2642366
(emphasis mine)

The Basic tab displays the following data: * Ever crawled: The cumulative total of URLs on your site that Google has ever crawled. Not all crawled URLs get indexed, and Google may discover some URLs by other means such as inbound links from other sites. This number should increase over time as new pages are added to your site. * Total indexed: The total number of URLs currently in Google's index. These URLs are available to appear in search results, along with other URLs Google may discover by other means. This number will change over time, as new pages are added and indexed, and old pages are removed. The number of indexed URLs is almost always significantly smaller than the number of crawled URLs, because it does not include URLs that have been identified as duplicates or non-canonical, or less useful, or that contain a meta noindex tag.

Apparently I don't rate an "ever crawled" because all I get is "total indexed" ::sob::

Hm. Wonder where those 29 pages went? (Difference between highest point on graph, and current number.) Maybe they got stolen by That Other Search Engine; their Total Indexed has been going back up.

"More information" for "not selected" takes you in turn to

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066

"Less useful" is an infuriatingly fuzzy phrase isn't it?