One of my latest articles had gotten indexed and was showing as indexed via the "site:" operator too, but it is now showing as indexed in Console only, not via the "site:" parameter. What could possibly be the reason?
1 Answer
I did my own research and went straight to Google's support pages, where on the page https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7474347?hl=en , I saw Google saying:
"If the report says that the page has been indexed" [in my case, the exact words were "Submitted and Indexed"]
"i. Check whether you (or someone else) successfully requested that the site or URL be removed from the index. Open the URL removal tool to look for approved requests of URL or site removal. If so, you can revoke the request. ii. The page may have been dropped or omitted from the index for totally innocuous reasons. (The web is immense, and Google doesn't get to every page, though we try to!) Ask Google to recrawl your page.
iii. Still having problems? Visit the Webmaster Forum and explain your problem (please be sure to describe the issue completely, and include links to your site)."
The first Google advice wasn't the issue (I confirmed this through the suggested URL removal tool), so I tried the second one (using "Request Indexing" inside Console) and am awaiting result (45 minutes since recrawl requested, not showing up as indexed via the "site:" parameter/operator at the time of this writing), but I now know (so do you) that after I (you) have tried all else, I am (you are) supposed to visit the Webmaster Forum and explain my (your) problem there in the hopes the solution will be found there in anybody's (possibly a Google staff member's) response.
site:searches won't show everything.