Only 9999 instances of dynamic page indexed. A limit?

Site has one QS parameter

[chris_w]

Hi

Site has dynamic urls with just one parameter.

blah.asp?id=<integer>

There are 50000+ instances of the page but G indexes exactly 9999. Id's from 1 to 9999 are all present and correct but no Id's greater than 9999.

Is there a limit? Has anyone seen this before or did the bot just get bored at 9999?

Chris

[rcjordan]

Interesting... Any old-time coder will tell you that a string of 9's may indicate error-trapping. You can certainly see the logic in setting a stop at that level.

[ruserious]

I see two possible answers to your question:

1) Because of the PR of your site, there is only a fixed amount of pages that google will crawl. So google had to stop somewhere, and it just happened to be at that id ... ok, kind of unlikely.

2) Google ignores pages with session-ids. So maybe having more than 5 numeric characters in a row in the query-string could be a qualifier (in Googles perspective) for that parameter to be classified as a session-id. Especially if the parameters real name on your site is indeed 'id' (not a good choice, judging from older topics).

Another reason may be the sctructure of your pages, because google supposedely only reads a page up to size x kb, and ignores the rest. Others say that only so many links on one page will be followed. So can you give more information on your page structure?

[chris_w]

All pages are 14-25k max and have about 10 links. pages that exist rank very well in SERPS against specific detailed kw. No real SEO on them - just sensible design, titles etc and they index well on the subject that they are about.

PR of index page is 7 and for the pgs like those in question is mostly 5 (via the toolbar).

Structure is index -> directory page -> detail page. Each detail is linked up to directory and to prev(ID) and next(ID) at same level.

Actual parameter is not id but 'xyz'ID - based on data from this forum.

rcjordan - speaking as an old timer it reminded me of pic(9999)too ...

C