Apol's for the long post, I've asked this on a few SEO forums, and no one can give an explanation, so hoping I'll have better luck here

Until November last year, our indexing on www.mylocalservices.co.uk was consistant, averaged 350,000 pages in the google index.

Then, and ever since it jumps all over the place. last week was a new record, site:www.mylocalservices.co.uk returned 10,400,000 pages.

Sounds great, but its nonsense. The week before it was 70,000, and before that it was 100,000.....

This week its been sitting around 1,100,000 pages, and this morning it showed 55,000 pages, although refreshed just, and it shows 1.1 million again.

Throughout this, traffic and adsense revenue have been fairly consistant, although we show a 5% increase, its not what I'd expect from a 250% increase in listed pages.

Our sitemap is updated daily and webmaster tools reports the following:
Sitemap stats
Total URLs: 1,906,789
Indexed URLs: 733,560

which is pretty consistant.


I know Google has a multitude of different data centres, and being a directory, it may see some of our pages as duplicate content, but can anyone offer any rational explanation why the results keep bouncing so dramatically?

Or is the "site:" tag no longer worth using as a guage to indexing?

Only explanation is the one you have alresdy stated, multiple datacentres.

It's what happens all the time. Nothing unusual at all.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Only explanation is the one you have alresdy stated, multiple datacentres.

It's what happens all the time. Nothing unusual at all.

So checking reguarly to see how a new site's G indexing is progressing then is pointless?

Thats a shame, the 'site:' switch always used to be a nice quick valuable indicator.

So I suppose you'd just base it off the sitemap reading in webmaster tools?

Your site logs and/or the conversion stats are the only reliable indicator of anything anything else is just distracting fluff.
If you had a real bricks & mortar business would you count the number of shelves in your shop/warehouse and think "Wow, I'm doing well!" or would you count the takings at the end of the day?

lol, thanks Chris, say it how it is!

Never really thought about it like that, just the wildly bouncing indexing results was making me worry we had some sort of problem.

Shall ignore this distracting fluff

Yes I agree with Chris. Multiple data center. One of my more weight website has

5993 indexed out of 6578.

same thing happened with me...

when I search in Google it shows me only 1300 pages but then suddenly, it was 36500 .. its amazing .. while my website has more than 55000 webpages.

I think .. something wrong with Google..

my indexed pages are also jumping dramatically.
It looks like google is reindexing.

Originally Posted by alexts

my indexed pages are also jumping dramatically.
It looks like google is reindexing.

Not really, this pattern has been happening repeatedly all year.

Only all year??

It's been happening since 1998!

Only then it only showed up once a month (or so)

We went from 655 to 7180 overnight so thanks for clarifying some of the factors.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Only explanation is the one you have alresdy stated, multiple datacentres.

It's what happens all the time. Nothing unusual at all.

So did u mean, there is acutally no so much pages??

It is just the datacentres work?

I'd say that measuring the number of pages on that scale is the wrong way to look at things.

I'd hazard a very good guess that 80% of your visitors only look at 20% of your pages (thank to Pareto!), and I bet those 20% have remained indexed throughout this episode?