My site is about 4+ months old. After the initial indexing, last 2+ months google constantly changing my indexed pages. It went up as high as 600,000 page to as low as 24,000 in recent past. After noticing first, I have been checking it last 2 months (using site:www.website.com). Even I check 6/7 times a day and I get very different number in every time (differences are big, in 100,000s). Is it normal? Something I should be aware of? By the way my site is data driven, mySQL and PHP with no mod_rewrite.
But I am checking form a single computer...using google search (site:website.com) and google sitemap. Should not I get data from single datacenter everytime?
Think of it as a simple round robin DNS (Though it's more complex, MUCH more) Each time you hit google.com you get thrown to a different datacenter. I'd be worried about the amount of pages you have versus the creation of your site...If it was open 5 months, that's over 100k pages a month? Err.. Things do change daily, but sometimes the different data centers don't change the data to have it constant throughout all of them - thus different results. Oh, and site: has some major problems right now. It's not reliable in the least.
Google is changing my number of indexded pages as well. Two days ago, it was 150~, now it is 1,400. Went back down to 150, then up to 1,300.
If you use Firefox try this extension : https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/590/ It will display the IP address(s) of the DCs that are displaying your results. -jay
google has been acting like this for months now, best think to do is work on your website and dont worry about it.
Thanks for all the replies.... I am not sure why I should be worried about the amount of pages I have vs. the creation of my site? As I said it is data driven site, I had all the pages from the first day...I have been adding some content/ changing page layout, but the URLs and title remains the same. Could you please explain why I would be worried?
Google wants quality original content. "A site that starts with 500,000 pages? There must be something wrong." Nobody can write that many pages, so it must be generated in some way. Google doesn't like that. He must think this site is created for Adsense purposes or other PPC. Google will investigate your site in all the ways it can, including human "inspectors". Or is you site a product datafeed site? (Shopping mall). Then you can forget good rankings. This hype is over.
I also have a website in the same state - but not that many pages. It is frustrating for webmasters and generally gives Google more power and control over the web and how they see things due to its market share. It will always be refuted by Google as part of ongoing quality refinement of search results ... but certainly gives many headaches.