I am really curious about the results that Google display when I do a site:mysite.com search to see how many pages are indexed. Most of the time I submit this search the results are about 600 pages. BUT if I click submit a few more times the results show 39,000+ When the high number of results come up and I scan through them they are true links, meaning that those pages are not phantom pages, they are actual pages on the site. The site is an article directory with about 4000 articlse. Does anyone have any idea why the results are so wide spread? The main reason I ask is I am thinking about selling this site in the future and don't want to mislead anyone on the number of indexed pages. Thanks to anyone who can help clear this up. Jere For some reason this thread was quickly moved from the search engine forum (although there are other similar questions still in that forum) Anyway, if anyone can provide an answer it sure would be appreciated.
Google has many different data centers, so if you send several queries to google.com it is possible that you will get a response from not just only 1 data center. Moreover Google is playing around with their new Big Daddy data centers. In my opinion that should explain those flunctuations. I experienced the same effect on some sites, too.