Not all SERPs show that are supposedly listed

Google SERPs discrepancies

[diamondgrl]

For a large site, I am trying to understand the SERPs in Google to see if it gives any clues as whether Google has some confusion about the site that might explain a big drop in referals.

For:

site:www.example.com

I get 50,000 results in the SERPs. When I click all the way through, it only shows 969 and then it gives the usual message of "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 969 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." I repeated the search with the omitted results included and got only 983.

I thought the first 1000 were supposed to show if there were more than 1000 results found. I wasn't expecting 969 or 983 and since the pages are unique, I have no idea why certain pages were omitted from the results.

Any idea how to explain the discrepancies?

When I repeat the search as:

site:www.example.com example

where the word "example" appears on every page on the site, Google says it has 20000, not 50000, results. But it shows only 548 before it gives the "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries ..." message. When the omitted results are included, it shows 997 total pages.

Any ideas on how to explain why different numbers appear here? Is Google confused?

[g1smd]

This happened at the same time that a "fix" started to appear for 302-hijacked domains. I reported it in another thread at that time.

The site: command no longer works exactly the same way that it did a few weeks and months ago.

The trick now, is to add &num=100&filter=0 to the Google search URL in the URL bar of the browser, as well as adding "the" or "of" or "on" or some other very common word to the search, like:

www.google.com/search?num=100&filter=0&q=site:domain.com+the

You'll then see a more accurate count of pages indexed, but you probably still won't get to the 1000th entry.