Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
My boss was panicking because one of our sites had dropped to only 74K pages indexed by Google. I checked on my computer. Nope- 1.33 million. Checked on his computer. Nope- 74K. Refreshed both computeres- same thing. Closed the browsers and re-entered the searches- same thing.
Finally had him delete his cookies and reload. Voila- 1.3 million pages. Instant SEO expert!
Moral of this story: the next time you see a huge sudden drop in Google, wait a while, delete your cookies, then search again.
Second moral of this story: next time, wait until the boss leaves for lunch, delete his cookies, then after lunch tell him how you worked all through lunch fixing Google's bug with their engineers. ;)
Were either of these computers "logged in" to a Google account?
The explanation that I gave to myself is that the boss happened to hit a particular data center during some sort of hiccup and was only showing a partial list. Then the set cookie somehow had Google serve up cached results, until the cookie was cleared.
The search was a site:domain.com search, so maybe Google's setting a cookie to give out cached results for site: searches in the hopes that people will stop checking how many pages they have indexed 20 times/day?
But I really have no idea- just wanted to toss this situation out to see if anyone else had ever come across this.
[edited by: LifeinAsia at 9:50 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2008]
