2000 pages of our site now missing from site: operator

[anand84]

Hi

We have this big website of nearly 10K - 11K pages..In mid January, the number of site results when I enter site:www.example.com would return somewhere around 9.5K pages..Since then it has been falling alarmingly..

Now, the search results 6800 odd results! It's so alarming..

Let me tell what has changed since then..We have around 59 subdomains for the website..In January we had added one new subdomain and all new posting was done only on that one..When the fall started happening, we thought it was because the other subdomains were going static and so for the past two weeks and more, we have been updating all categories..Still, the number of indexed pages has not stopped falling.

Any inputs?

Thanks

[kidder]

How are your traffic levels? The site: operator command is not known for being exact at the best of times, unless you have lost rankings and traffic I would not be sweating just yet.

[anand84]

The traffic has just been at the same levels. +/- 200 uniques I would say..

But that does not necessarily mean we are out of danger in my opinion., because this is the same traffic level we had in December (which is traditionally low because of Christmas). We expected a spike to happen and that has not happened..

[anand84]

Hi

The page numbers are falling further..It's 6400+ now...Could someone please help me out..

[Robert Charlton]

We expected a spike to happen and that has not happened..

anand84 - I don't know whether your traffic is independent of the economy, but currently, because of world economic conditions, there are a great many expected spikes that have not happened.

You might want to check your site: operator results directory by directory. Look at this discussion, which describes how this method can sometimes find pages assumed to be missing on an overall site:domain search....

Google's Site: Operator - Digging Deeper Returns More URLs
[webmasterworld.com...]

Also, take a look at Google Trends to see if they have any information on search trends in your niche. Often, Trends will demonstrate very clearly what's going on, though it only shows data for heavily searched phrases.

Again, the site: operator is not known for its accuracy.

[anand84]

Thanks Robert..I did a small exercise now..I tried the site operator for all the individual subdomains of my website.com. The sum comes to around 7520; a thousand more than what is shown for site:website.com

But then, that is still a few thousands away from the original number of pages..