My google webmaster tools states taht it has 10 pages from my sitemap indexed yet when I click on the index stats it says it cannot find any pages in the google index. Does it take google time to update the results for a page. I have another site which doesn't even have a sitemap and this has over 30 pages indexed and showing in searches. What is happening??
Site with 30 pages older than the one with 10 pages? Site with 30 pages has more links than the 10 page site probably. Webmaster Tool is a tool to use. Nothing says it will be up to date or 100% accurate. A hammer is a tool, it can build but it also can destroy. The tool is only as good as the house you build with it..
Google crawler might have difficulty to crawl specific indexed page( it might have redirected or moved) , you can check with the diagnostic area of google webmaster tools to find the error and try to fix that.
I don't know why it happens, but it is a common discrepancy. "site:" operator in Google search & "Indexed URLs" in webmaster tools give different results.
Site with 30 pages is 5 days old Site with 10 pages is 3 months old. Site with 30 pages is a blog. Site with 10 pages is a website. Google doesn't seem to crawl the homepage of the 10 page site. It has crawled the homepage of the 30 page site already and has the description and cache and links for the site already
Seems your website may have a robots instruction not to crawl the index page or possibly a directory named something like in.. or ind...... Otherwise you either have an html error or infinite loop that is choking the spider, and if that's the case ,the spider will stop crawling the page and move on. Hope it helps!