Difference between Google indexed and search results

Have only 2 pages indexed by Google, but 125 K+ in search results

[chicora]

Hi - I apologize if this is considered a stupid question. I have a large health site and if I type in the name of the site inside quotation marks, more than 125,000 results appear. I know they are all related to my site because the name is quite distinct.

But when I search to see how many pages have been indexed by google - site:www.(site name).com it only shows 2 pages!

Looking at Googles explanation of why it may have not indexed pages [google.com...] it mentions a few reasons like dynamic pages etc.. Now most of our pages are dynamic, though they don't contain a "?" in the url. Is this the probable reason for the low number of indexed pages?

Is it bad to have so few indexed pages, or should I be more concerned about the large number of "hits" that Google shows for the site name? I did try adding Google's site search option but it was a dismal failure - I suppose due to the fact that it hasn't indexed any pages on the site.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

[tedster]

Yes, there's a big difference between pages that talk ABOUT your site, and pages that are actually urls FROM your site. If the site: operator only returns 2 results out of a possible 125,000 I'd say it's definitely time to take a look at your links for any reason that Googlebot may have trouble crawling deeper.

You don't by any chance require a cookie to be accepted for users to go deep into your site, do you?

[vincevincevince]

Very strange. If you add &filter=0 to the end of your search results URL - how many do you see?

[chicora]

HI - thanks for the help. No, we don't require cookies to browse the site, only for members. Also, adding &filter=0 to the end of the search results URL still produces the same number of results.

I first suspected that google hadn't spidered our pages when we tried adding the Adsense google search function. It produced almost no internal results for any search done.

[g1smd]

I have seen this. Try it again with something like:

site:domain.com THE

or

site:domain.com A

I have seen several occasions where adding a word suddenly reveals many of the other pages.

[g1smd]

Additionally check whether your pages are indexed as domain.com instead of www.domain.com - if both are accessible (and both serve as "200 OK") then you need to add a 301 redirect as a matter of urgency to fix the problem.

[chicora]

Thanks, very helpful.

Doing a search for - site:domain.com THE - does improve the number of results. About 8,000 are now showing. This does seem to reflect the core content of the site – the pages for health treatments that users can then rate.

Using - site:domain.com A – brings up about 1,000 fewer results. Hard to say how the list differs from “THE”.

A search for site:domain.com brings up 75,000 results. In comparison the search for site:www.domain.com brings up only the 2! However, for the site:domain.com search, the results pages don’t show the page title tags or meta description tag wording. Instead (probably 90% of the time) they just show the url in blue.

So, what does this all mean? Does the adequate results number found in - site:domain.com THE - show that google has actually spidered the pages on my site? If so, why did the google internal search tool fail so miserably when I tried it?

Many thanks.

[g1smd]

All the stuff showing as "URL-only" is probably being suppressed as "duplicate content".

You have two sites: non-www and www - Google treats them separately.

You have also split your PageRank between the non-www and www versions of your site.

If www.domain.com/page1.html is shown in the SERPs and it links to www.domain.com/page2.html, but for "page2 it is domain.com/page2.html (non-www) that is shown in the SERPs then it isn't getting any PR passed from "page1.html" is it?

A 301 redirect will fix this. You need to redirect TO the server default. The server default can be edited in the httpd.conf file if you need it to be the reverse of whatever it is now.

[TheGuyAboveYou]

Hi

If I type site:sitename.com verse site:www.sitename.com I get a difference of about
30 pages? Is this not suppose to happen?

Should I have a redirect? If so what does the line of code look like?

redirect 301?

Thanks

[g1smd]

For Apache, this goes in your .htaccess file; assuming that it is www.mydomainname.com that you want to promote:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomainname.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomainname.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^my-other-domain-name.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomainname.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.my-other-domain-name.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomainname.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Omit the last four lines if you only have one domain name.

If you have yet more domains then add another 4 lines for every extra domain that you do have.