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When I have check my website index pages it is showing only 252 pages are indexed but when I checked through Google Search by typing site:http://www.example.com then is showing more then 900 pages are indexed.

What is this issue and even on Webmaster Tools I have submitted XML sitemap and number of pages are submitted 900+ but why index is showing low?

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  • Maybe just a delay to update data about your site on your Webmaster Tools account.
    – Zistoloen
    Feb 3, 2014 at 20:00

3 Answers 3

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Do the urls which are indexed exactly match the urls on your sitemap ? If so, they should be counted within the ones 'indexed'.

If you have a mismatch of hundreds then try to compare the urls to your sitemap urls. It could be that Google is indexing different urls than what you have submitted, maybe something like wrong version of the website or irrelevant urls which you didn't want indexing like search or calendar pages.

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  • Thanks and yes exactly some of urls which indexed in Google not showing in xml sitemap but why ? like this one is not showing on xml map puttinout.com/resources I have generated sitemap through web-site-map.com thi sportal please help
    – Shobee
    Feb 4, 2014 at 14:52
  • I would probably try and generate a more accurate sitemap, you have /tag urls listed there which you might not want to specify and also as you say - urls missing. You have lots of /attachment and ?attachment urls indexed which you could look at. Did you want them indexed ? And a couple of subdomains test. and onlinemarketing. Looks like you are using wordpress, try searching the plugs in there for a sitemap generator as there are some good ones.
    – user29671
    Feb 4, 2014 at 16:02
  • Thanks and i have understand many of things. Just want two ask if i use robots.txt for these unwanted url it will be blocked or not such as Disallow:? Disallow:/tag Disallow:/attachment Please answer.
    – Shobee
    Feb 4, 2014 at 19:28
  • You can use robots.txt and disallowing as you write would stop google from crawling them. It might be better to use a noindex though so google can crawl through and understand your site but not index them. I would probably look into x-robots-tag here. Have a look at this resource : developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index
    – user29671
    Feb 4, 2014 at 20:40
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This has to do with a combination of things. Your sitemap doesn't really tell Google what to index. It's more of a guide for the spiders than anything else. In fact, if you didn't have a sitemap, but you did submitted your website to Google, it would still be crawled.

The problem with having site:domain.com showing you so many, it's because, to the search engine spiders, anything and everything that could potentially be opened with an url, is a page. This is most frequent with WordPress sites. For example, if you have a woocomerce WordPress, technically every single product can be open in its own page. It would look like this :

www.example.com/category1/products/product1/variation1

So if you had 40 products divided in 5 categories, and each product has 3 color variations or sizes. You will have 125 pages that are not really in your site structure or even in your sitemap. 120 of them may be of good use for you, but the 5 category pages are useless.

do some work in your robot.txt file. make a notation from your site:domain.com and disallow all 404s and all pages that provide no SEO value to you. (e.g. terms and condition, privacy policy, category pages, tag pages, a picture that shows in its own page when clicked, etc)

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You can't trust the number of results you get when you do a site: search. The numbers from Google Webmaster Tools will be much more accurate.

First, the number of results returned by Google for any search (not just site searches) is often wildly innacurate. The linked article goes into a lot of detail about the reasons for this, and includes the following quote from Google's Matt Cutts:

We try to be very clear that our results estimates are just that–estimates. In theory we could spend cycles on that aspect of our system, but in practice we have a lot of other things to work on, and more accurate results estimates is lower on the list than lots of other things.

For site: searches, Google tries to make the results somewhat less informative on purpose. This is done to prevent people from divining too much knowledge about Google and the websites they index by doing specially crafted searches. In this case, Google has decided to show the number of indexed pages on your site only to you, the webmaster, through their authenticated webmaster console. They show a inaccurate number to the public on purpose. They believe that the number of indexed documents on your site is for you to know and Google to know, but it should be your secret.

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