How to find how many pages are indexed in google

Sounds like a simple thing.  Everyone knows the good old “site:” command for google.  For example

site:www.attheboard.com

shows “about 29,900 pages”

Well, that my be “about” due to status in indexing and possible duplicate content being weeded out.

but there is more…

try putting the site command with some minus random jiber… such as site:www.attheboard.com -lkskjdfkjd

shows “about 31,300 pages”

WHY????  no idea…  Maybe more complex queries touch other servers or part of the google data center that give different results.  Try it with different lengths of jiber.  The results will vary.

Try adding and removing the www in front and the results will also vary.  Remember, if you track this on an ongoing basis, to use the same method for generating the counts.  You still might get variance day to day, but that is the luck of the draw with the datacenters.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 3:26 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.