Two kinds of Google index

Question

I am curious about information that gave me Google's Webmaster Tools. Because I see two different information about Google index of same webpage in same time.

First information (sitemap files)

I submitted sitemap.xml a couple of months ago, now I can see charts about how many pages were sent for indexation and how many of them were indexed. Right now it reports that 106 of total 113 pages were indexed.

Second information (left menu -> Google index -> Index status)

In Index status section there is information about number of indexed page, which is zero. In the lower chart I can see that it always was zero.

I would like to ask is there any difference among these indices and what?

Answer 1

Google looks at things differently than we do. Sorry. That is just the way it is. Sometimes you have to see things from Google's perspective before the data makes sense.

The Google Webmaster Tools data lags behind a couple of days and some elements a bit more. As far as the various Index Counts, this explains why the difference. However, there is no direct line between the sitemap and the number of pages indexed. The reason for this is simple. Google does not rely upon the sitemap exclusively and will find pages through it's spider. It is possible that the index has listed pages that no longer exist or pages due to bad links that are 404 pages or soft 404 pages. At one point, Google was reporting 2 times as many pages I actually had due to an error that created bad links. This should have resulted in hard 404 errors without a 404 page, but it took several months before Google began dropping these pages. It has not fully corrected itself after 6 months. This is because Google has not tried to hit all of these pages enough to de-list them.

As for why Google is telling you that you have 0 index pages in the Index Status, I have no idea. You can check the number simply by doing a site:example.com style query in Google Search. But please understand that this number can fluctuate with index refreshes which happens several times a day. If the number based upon the search is not 0, then you have nothing to worry about. The GWT Index Status count has simply not been updated for what ever reason. Only God and Google knows why.