Indexed Page Count TOO high

Page count too high

[jimvet]

I have a site with no more than about 6000 total pages. However, Google returns a count of nearly 19,000 pages while Yahoo and the others return a count of only about 350 pages.

What is going on? Can I believe Yahoo? I know I can't believe Google. Back in March 05, Google showed 5900 pages indexed which made sense but now, I'm at a loss.

anyone have an explanation?

Thanks,

Jim

[KenB]

Probably the result of the rewrite you are using or odd characters in your url. For example Google sees the following as different pages:

example.com/blue widgets.html
example.com/blue%20widgets.html
example.com/Blue Widgets.html
example.com/blue%20widgets.html?sessionID=123564

[Rollo]

Are you using a CMS? They can multiply the number of pages as each actual page of content has many related URLs needed for the CMS to do its thing. To the user, and certianly in my mind, they all are the same, but to the spiders they are different pages and show up in the indexed pages count. Seems like no harm to me. Makes you look bigger than you are and scares your competetors.

[wingslevel]

I had the same problem.

Found that my internal link structure was bad - my site map was referring to a page as:

mysite.com/cat312/itemid12345

wheras my internal linking structire referred to the same page as:

mysite.com/itemid12345

they were both the same page but gbot thought they were 2 pages.

nothing like halving the pr on all of your subpages and risking a dup penalty to figure that one out...