Google Recommends Not Looking at Site Command Results

The site command (site:www.domain.com) is often used to determine the health of a web site in a search engine. The thing is, Google's site command is far from accurate and too many SEOs look at it too closely. We discussed this before and I just want to cover it again.

Googler, JohnMu, said in a Google Webmaster Help thread:

Focusing on the site:-query rough approximations will not lead to useful results.

Did he just say that the site command results are not useful? Are you surprised? I'm not. Like I said, we said this before.

For example, a site:www.seroundtable.com command returns for me over 17,000 pages. When I look at Google Webmaster Tools, I see indexed URLs at 9,921. So who do I believe?

We discussed the site command dozens of times here over the course of about 6 years. It is interesting to see how this has changed over the years.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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posted rustybrick in Google Optimization at July 15, 2009 8:04 AM Comments (4)

Comments

LOL! So we're supposed to trust the information provided by Webmaster Tools rather than what we find in the search results.

Nice conundrum, Google. Maybe you should fix one or the other and then start advising people where to look for information about how many pages are indexed.

Posted by Michael Martinez at July 15, 2009 13:18

From what I have seen the supplemental pages are in the site: search results, but Google does not include them in the counts for indexed pages in the Webmaster tools. And no surprises here ... we still use the site search as a gauge of the potential pages to push into the index

Posted by Aloysius Carl at July 15, 2009 15:47

no link: command, no site: command...do wee need to hack into someone's web-master central account to see the stats for a website :s

Posted by seoz87 at July 15, 2009 23:46

By the way to contrast this with Yahoo’s offerings; their Site Explorer is amazingly accurate.

Use that I say.

Posted by Rob Abdul at July 16, 2009 03:59