How often does your "site:" count change?

if you aren't adding or removing pages

[Tonearm]

How often do you see your page count change in searches like these if you haven't added or removed pages recently:

site:www.example.com (all pages)
site:www.example.com/* (non-supplemental pages)

[Atomic]

Sometimes several times a day.

[Robert Charlton]

Sometimes several times a day.

Rather than watching paint dry, why not spend that time adding some good content to your site?

[Tonearm]

I made a big change to my internal linking structure about a month ago and started watching the site: counts. A week or so later they started dropping, and then the site:www.example.com/* count shot up and so did traffic.

A couple weeks ago I made another big internal linking change and there has been a fairly steady decline ever since. At this point I'm trying to determine when Google has "taken into account" this second change so I can make a decision as to whether or not it was beneficial.

[g1smd]

It changes all the time.

This is partly because Google has several different versions of their index spread across their many datacentres, and partly because they add and drop things all the time, and partly because for counts above 1000 they are usually only an estimate.

[Atomic]

Rather than watching paint dry, why not spend that time adding some good content to your site?

How do you know how much time I spend a day on any of my activities? What if monitoring things like this was my area of responsibility and content was someone elses, as the case is with many of my sites. Poo on me for replying with an answer to a legitimate question.

[edited by: Atomic at 4:43 pm (utc) on Aug. 18, 2007]

[Robert Charlton]

Atomic - Your point well taken and sorry for the tone. IMO, it can be useful to check out site count after making site changes, but "several times a day" simply seems excessive to me for this particular task. As g1smd points out, because of multiple data centers and the approximations that Google makes in its site figures, the fine fluctuations observed aren't meaningful in any event.

[Atomic]

What have a blown to monitor counts maybe 4 times a dasy or so...a full minute? It's especially interesting when major changes have been done and your boss is keenly interested in results. Keeping them up-to-date on how their previously unindexed site is improving can keep them happy. Believe me, if it really cost me that much time, I wouldn't do it!