I wonder why google reports 5 times more page indexed for my site than it actually has? Say for example I have a site that maximum has 10000 pages but site:www.myDomain.com shows 50000 pages. The reason I ask this question is that google has started to drop some number of pages off my site and I don't know if it is those "non-existed" pages or real pages. .
It's possible that if your sitre is dynamic, and it probably is at that size, then you may be refering to the same content more then once. You have to remember that Google indexes pages, not sites, and unique query strings make a page unique in Google's eyes. As a result you may be serving the same content up to Google and now getting hit with a duplicate content penalty.
I have a static site and Google returns a full 10x the amount of pages in the index. It was getting cleared out last week to the correct amount on about a dozen dc's and my ranking was top 5 on those. If you have been following the dc movement the last couple weeks, you can probably guess which ones those were. Google lists 17,000 pages when I only have 1,500. I have a sitemap with Google since January.
You may be missing some dynamic or semi-dynamic pages. Eg. I advertise villas on my site and each villa page has a special 'Contact Owner' link. That counts as a unique page for each villa. Also stuff like slideshow pages can really skew the indexed number.
Yep. Interesting to see these complaints about Google indexing "nonexistent pages", though -- the majority of complaints are about the opposite, with hundreds or thousands of legitimate pages getting dropped. I can not believe I'm saying this but it's finally true: SOMETHING is definitely broken at Google now.
There were some dc's that were listing my site as 1,000 pages in the index last week, and I was top 5 in serps. Unfortunately, they went up to 17,000 on Friday and I dropped down to 60 in serp. I am moving down to 14,600 pages indexed on some dc's in the last hour today and moved up a half dozen spots in serps. Clearly there is the dupe filter on this, and clearly something is broken. Every page I have is static. MSN and Yahoo all have the right number of pages indexed and I am #2 on both 99% of the time. I am #2 for my allins on Google.
This is very strange that Google is showing 17K pages,while your website has only 1K pages. Hey have you checked the pages thoroughly,which pages are not from your site and which are new indexed pages ? Try this analysis. Thanks_
It's not just Google - I have a site with 21 pages but MSN shows 103 results for the search "site:mysite.com" However when I look at the individual result pages, it doesnt go beyond 21 results - all result pages beyond result page three show the same result as the third result page (My settings are 10 results per page.)
Sent an email off to Google to try to get them to look into this. This morning I woke up to 13,600 pages indexed on 75% of the dc's. Rankings up to top 5 on half of those. On the remaining dc's I now have 15,000 pages indexed and up to low 50's. So 3,500 pages removed from index resulted in moving up 10 places on some dc's and 55 on some others. I have 5 sites, but only 1 has this problem.