WMT - Indexing stats discrepancy

[Whitey]

Within Google webmaster tools we have 2 seperate indexing stats which i thought should match.

site: Indexed pages in your site = 7,440

Then it says " See how many URLs Google has indexed in the Sitemaps you have submitted."

Sitemap stats
Total URLs: 39,705
Indexed URLs: 21,769

Should the 2 statistics match ? Or does this indicate an issue ?

[tedster]

Could be a bug or a real issue. How many URLs are on your XML sitemap?

[Whitey]

There are 39704

[tedster]

The 21,769 number sounds a lot more real than the 7,440. If I had to guess, I'd say the site: operator number is really buggy. Has it always been this far below the total number of pages you have?

[Whitey]

On this particular site I've not looked at the "site: "tool in WMT for some time. So i can't answer this.

[ However, this site has recently emerged from a penalty around 2-3 months ago and seems to be taking it's time to regain trust in the rankings. There seems to be some sporadic ranking restrictions on this site.]

Because the site: tool is buggy i thought that I'd ask, but all the "bug" reports I've read and experienced were utlising the tool via general search. Not sure if WMT or general search is different in reliability. On this occasion they are the same.

Somewhere along the line i thought i heard MC say that the site: command in WMT was more accurate. But i can't see any difference.

I thought I'd check out some more sites we have. Another one shows :

Site: 4150

Sitemap stats
Total URLs: 5008
Indexed URLs: 4008

This site is stable in the rankings.

Then I went to one that is under a current penalty, even though i don't know if this relevant.

Site: 5980

Sitemap stats
Total URLs: 31246
Indexed URLs: 16348

[tedster]

AFAIK it doesn't matter whether you use the site: operator from regular search or within a Webmaster Tools account - it's the same results.

You should be able to get a handle on this discrepancy by looking at Google referer traffic and comparing it to the list of urls that are returned by the site: operator. My bet is you'll see lots of pages that are not in site: results but still get search traffic.