site:domain.com shows only 1/4 of pages

Google shows only 280 pages from 800 indexed

[sasha]

Google spidered my domain about 2 weeks ago (not fully) and updated its index. My logs from that time show that they spidered over 800 files. Now when I do site:mydomain.com and allinurl:mydomain.com commands Google shows only the first 280 pages out of about 800.

Also, it seems that as far as the SERPS are concerned, only 280 pages are in the index - the rest of the pages are in limbo somewhere.

Anybody has an answer why Google says they have indexed 800?

[DerekH]

These things happen.
The very nature of Google means that at any one time, the instantaneous snapshot is unlikely to represent the state of Google as a whole - it's a bit like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle - if you observe it, the fact that you're observing it will mean that you'll not see the real picture!

Other people, like myself, are wondering how a page that has been indexed a year ago, and unchanged since, can suddenly be marked as "page exists but hasn't been indexed yet"

But one thing is sure - your site will reach a steady state in Google that it hasn't reached yet.

DerekH

[DerekH]

As a PS, a site that has been visited but not fully indexed will behave in rather curious ways.

One of my sites has pages that are listed in google.com as unindexed, but are not listed at all in google.co.uk, even though the ISP and domain name are both UK-based.

DerekH

[BigDave]

did it visit 800 pages total, or 800 *different* pages?

Does that count include gets of robots.txt and any non-200 status gets?

Is this a new site, or were the other pages in the index already?

Google checks my robots.txt, home page, and what's new page several times each day. Each of those count as a hit by googlebot.

And if your site is new, don't expect every page to make it into the index right away. It took three months before google was truly deep crawling my site. If you got over 1/3 of your pages indexed in the first month, you are doing great.

[sasha]

The site currently has approx. 1,200 pages. Google initially visited about 300 pages according to my logs and after about 2 weeks it showed "230 pages out of 230" pages under site:www.mydomain.com as being in its index.

Then after about 1 month it indexed about 830 pages according to my logs and after about 2 weeks it started showing "300 pages out of 800". This seems strange. It would be more logical for it to show "300 out of 300" or "800 out of 800".

Perhaps there is a relationship b/w site PR and # of pages that Google can display in its index?

My site PR is only a 4...

The answer I am hoping for is that this is just temporary and the remainder of the pages will soon appear in the index...