Google showing more pages than i have

Site:www.mydomain.com

[4crests]

This evening, google is showing a huge amount of pages for all of my sites. Over 3 million pages for one of my sites, which only really has about 30,000 pages. Anyone else?

[tedster]

That doesn't sound good. However, if the inflated count never showed before, and you haven't made changes to the site infrastrucure recently, this could also be a data glitch that will vanish as quickly as it showed up.

The first thing to note is that the page counts in a site: query are approximations -- and this is especially true when the count is higher than 1,000. You can even see the numbers change sometimes as you click into the deeper pages. It is VERY common for the count to be off by a factor of 4 or even more. However, being off by a factor of 100 is not a good sign, in my opinion.

Google doesn't really index "pages" it indexes "urls". That result you are seeing could well mean that your site has many urls that will resolve to the exact same content -- and that situation can head your site for trouble.

So I'd suggest looking through the urls in the report very closely (read the actual urls, not the titles) to see if some kind of technical situation is creating different versions of urls for the same page.

[4crests]

All four of my sites are showing inflated pages. They are all YAHOO STORES, and i have changed nothing on them in the past few months.

[4crests]

this only happens when i use SITE:www.mydomain.com

When i use ALLINURL:www.mydomain.com then it shows the normal amount of pages i should have.

[hvacdirect]

They are playing with the site: knobs today in my opinion. After seeing some threads about a roll back in the supp. pages I started checking sites.

One today has gone from 1350, 15,800, and now 46,000 pages for a 3000 page site, so I'd say its flux of some sort that will probably fix itself soon enough.

[4crests]

Thanks HVA... Good to know it's not just me!

[tedster]

I just checked two historically inflated domains that I work with, and both of them are spot on right now, for the first time in several years. A third domain that was running 12x is now only about x3. Something is definitely afoot, but it's disturbing to hear that some domains seem to be headed the wrong way.

[ken_b]

I just checked two historically inflated domains that I work with, and both of them are spot on right now, for the first time in several years.

My site has a history of something like this... (approximate dates)

July 2004 - 1,400 pages (about correct)
August 2004 - 4,200 pages
April 2005 - 9,000 pages
November - 2005 - 12,000

This Monday - 1,420 pages (back to about correct)
Tuesday - 1,410 pages
Wednesday - 1,400 pages.

I was hoping that the far overstating of page counts was finally a thing of the past, so this thread is troublesome.

[goubarev]

I too see wild fuctuations in site: command for many of my sites on many data-centers - all throughout today. Seems like some geek at google pushing the +/- button... :c)

[walkman]

my site too has about 3X the normal number. However the real indexed page number is much, much lower and about the same as the previous days.

As far as tuning the knobs: Anyone thinks Google will have another update on the 27th? Lately they have one each month; in august the switched to the 17th. Was it to have the Labor Day free-er or to start the update and finish it on the 27th?

[ken_b]

I should have said in my previous post that the numbers shown are the result of a site:search

The actual number of pages on the site was in the 1,400 - 1,500 range when this started and is now more like 1,500 - 1,600.

[nikhildev]

One more thing about this is that sometimes, google tends to pump in the previously cached urls in the site search count, These are called supplemental results. These also can be pages that are non existent but Google has a cached copy that might be useful to the searching user. Also even if the page is removed, dynamic pages like those of php remain in such cases.

[sviba]

Yes in the month of june my site has 130,000 pages are indexed, in july above 1,000,000. Mid of the august 182,000, but now 340,000.
Any major updation is going?

[Crush]

some sites we have 1.6 mil pages :) Google is on a funny turn

[r3nz0]

Google has also index one site of mine very wrong

last 3 months it shows up about 19.000 pages/url's

now it's correct about 1400

i also found a intresting thing when you do site:yourdomain.xom And then do 'search within results'

You will see google send the total amount of pages as number in the query to do the search.. the param for this thing is 'swrnum=' , so they telling their own engine in how many links to search!

[Angelis]

Could this have anything to do with removing old "supplimental results"?

[ken_b]

My site has a history of something like this... (approximate dates)

July 2004 - 1,400 pages (about correct)
August 2004 - 4,200 pages
April 2005 - 9,000 pages
November - 2005 - 12,000

This Monday - 1,420 pages (back to about correct)
Tuesday - 1,410 pages
Wednesday - 1,400 pages.

I'm now down to 1,390 pages listed. I may not like this any more than an over count if this keeps up.

Could this have anything to do with removing old "supplimental results"?

I've been wondering about that. Seems sort of reasonable, but who knows.

[KenB]

I'd recommend making sure you are sending the proper 404 error codes in server headers for invalid URLs. I'd also recommend making sure that you are returning 301 codes for any redirects. If you are not returning 404 or 301 codes when appropriate in server headers, Google may be indexing phantom pages.