Does Google maintain two sets of indexes?

google indexing problems

[jj8070]

Hi,

We are seeing a very strange behavior with the way Google counting inbound links to our site. When we enter "link:www.example.com" into google, it will report two numbers depending on the day when the query is performed. The result will be either 5050 links or 1300 links. The result will change almost every day.

Since we noticed this problem about 2-3 months ago, our PR ranking has taken a hit. Our site main used to be PR7, but now it is unranked, although many of the other pages have kepted their PR rankings. But rankings with many phrases have dropped and as a result we are seeing a reduced number of referrals from Google.

Our site is one of the largest in its category and it has been around since 1995. We do not use any search engine tricks. Most of our pages are just regular html pages.

What can we do to fix the problem? If there someone in Google who we can talked to?

Any advice is appreciated.

[edited by: ciml at 9:15 am (utc) on April 11, 2005]
[edit reason] Examplified [/edit]

[g1smd]

Google has at least 2 indexes in use. They feed one of them to the public most of the time, rotate others in as they test them, and have several datacentres with other index(es) that you'll never see unless you directly access that datacentre using its IP address.

The scraper3 tool at Scroogle can show you some insight to that.

[jj8070]

Is there a way to find our if my site is penalized by Google?

[theBear]

jj8070,

You have mail .... chalk up another victim of the canonicial page cannon.

ciml, ya just got to be faster ;).

[jj8070]

> chalk up another victim of the canonicial page cannon.

What is "canonicial page cannon"? Sorry I am new to a lot of SEO stuff.

[g1smd]

Just read all the threads about the "302 redirect problems".