site: command

returns strange results

[proboscis]

What does it mean if the site: command returns over 9000 results when the site in question only has 1000 pages?

[texasville]

it means google is broke...usually. Does it give you that kind of return in other se's or are they returning correctly.

[proboscis]

Yahoo returns the correct amount.

It's strange when I get to the very end of the results on Google it says "901 - 911 of about 9,590" but it won't let me see the thousands of extra pages.

I have PPS - phantom pages syndrome...

[texasville]

Are you possibly using a content management program? Is there more than one way to reach the same page, possibly connoting a dup content? Meaning google may be accessing the same page 3-4 different times and thus...many more pages than are actually there.

[g1smd]

Break the site: search down by folders, or page types, or something, so that all results are under 1000 entries, then manually add them all up.

[stinkfoot]

Google is broken and has been broken for over a year now and they cant be bothered to fix it .. why should they .. its a free service ... if you wish to complain to them about it, that is make a complaint they will listen too ... use MSN or Yahoo instead

[proboscis]

Years ago I put one of those "top 100 sites" scripts on my site.(popular with hobby sites in the 90's not a nudey one or anything) It has counter urls that are all different but all point to the same page. It ran for years but I closed it and removed everything from my site last year, and I used the url removal tool to remove the dead pages.

But just now I tried breaking up the site: search and I see that my 404 page is indexed with one of those old counter urls...cached june 17,2005 it has my 404 page title and everything.

I used the server header checker thing and it says it is a 404 for both the 404 page and the counter url...why would a 404 page get indexed?

I didn't have 8000 members even when the "top 100" site was running so that still wouldn't account for all of the phantom pages.

Thanks for the ideas so far! I'll keep looking.

[g1smd]

Hmm, I see some pages that were last modified in 2003 May and which have had the <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag on each one since at least that time, that are listed in Google as Supplemental Results with a full title and snippet, and with a full cache from 2005 June.

Google has been ignoring the robots meta tag.

[proboscis]

oh, uh-oh, I just found 1060 pages in the supplemental index that are indexed completely insanely.

They have my correct url, but then a trailing slash is appended and then it just adds on random directories and pages like this:

www.example.com/page.shtml/dir1/dir3/dir4/dir2/doo.shtml

Is that my server or is googlebot bouncing around like a nut?

I thought MCutts said things in the supplemental can't hurt us - but this can't be good?