Hope this is the right forum all! OK... so I've got 50+ websites and I have just laboriously created sitemaps and posted them to google. So... Is there a tool, which in ONE PLACE I can see howmany pages in my sites are indexed? Sure, I can go to google and go site:www.mysite.com and see... but is there a tool that can do that quickly for all my sites so I can see, overall how I'm doing? Thanks for any help!
Google webmaster central will only show 1 site per time, of course, you can have all of them under the same account.
I agree with deedeedum - sitemaps don't do anything, at the moment, on the front end of Google search. And to answer the original post, the problem with doing site: is that just shows the results from whatever data centre you're using. For a true reflection you need to query each data centre individually. You will get different results from each one - some will be favourable, some won't. The question is, are they future echos or not? IE One data centre may show 1000 pages indexed (100%) and another 2 show 500 - which one will be the one that most users get? Which one will the other data centres sync with? See, this is one of the problems - there are so many intangiables that you can chase your tail for ever. I find the best approach is to ensure the site is crawlable, that your on-site SEO is ok and then focus on getting inbound links - especially to inside pages (IE not just the homepage). Don't you just love Google? I'm not one of those that doesn't understand the rules, I do but because I understand the rules I see the failings of Google's infrastructure - for some reason, others don't - go figure.