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Many SEOs determine the health of a site in Google by the saturation of the number of pages Google has indexed. They basically want to know how many pages of their site Google has in their index. So if I have a site with 1,000 pages are a 100% of them indexed by Google?
The way SEOs go about it differ. Back in the day, most SEOs used a site command. For example, they would plug into Google [site:www.seroundtable.com]. But when Google released Google Webmaster Tools, SEOs began to notice a difference between the index count in Webmaster Tools and the Site command. So which is right?
JohnMu from Google said that the site command is not useful and does not lead to accurate results. Hey, look, a site command leads to over 15,000 pages indexed on this site:
But Webmaster Tools shows only 8,000+:
I tell clients to ignore the site command and just look at Google Webmaster Tools. What do you do? Take my poll:
Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.
Comments:
wendy
03/24/2010 12:36 pm
There are a lot of SEOs I know who still use the site command. Some ranking tools (online) use the site operator as part of their "valuable" resources for comparing different websites. I keep saying that the site: operator results have been completely off the charts for at least 12 months. That said I was given the advice to "use the site: operator regularly" to "monitor my SEO efforts" by a well known and reputed SEO. Another SEO told me it was my most important metric. I've stopped using it and won't be going back, but I am really interested to see how this poll pans out.
Anil Gupta
03/24/2010 01:41 pm
Yeah, it makes sense to check the number of indexed pages on your website using Google webmaster tool, but you will have no option except using site: command for other websites you don;t own.
AK Works
03/24/2010 02:27 pm
I use Google Webmaster Tools for indexed pages and IBL count. I'm befuddled as to why Yahoo and Bing don't have their own version of this. Bing would be particularly useful to have since it seems to have problems indexing the correct number of pages w/o dupe problems (dynamic parameters, etc.) Yahoo's Siteexplorer just plain sucks. It's not close to accurate plus if you use the old search operators like "link:http://www.domain.com -site:domain.com" etc., you still get different counts than Siteexplorer. GWT is best.
azWebsiteWorth.com
02/07/2011 03:02 pm
Great info. thanks for sharing.
Trends
03/17/2012 08:29 am
Google is changing its alogrithm so lets see
Shout Me Tech
03/25/2012 06:55 pm
I prefer checking it in Google with site:domain.com Though I doubt the accuracy.