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On my clients website I have the www and the non-www setup on GWM the website uses the non-www version but I have both set up anyway.

This is a new client that I've only been working with for a month but I've never seen Google Webmasters have data delayed for an entire month.

GWM has the website listed with 0 pages index (yes, I checked the www and the non-www GWM sites). The website is built on WP so the first thing I did was check pagespeed to see if there was a lot of render blocking causing the 0 index result. There were 2 pages (this website is about 30 pages in total) with render blocking issues.

My next step was to do a Site:website.com search and I found that Google displayed 26 webpages as being indexed for the non-www (0 index for www).

Personally, I've never seen this before. Google Webmaster's is telling me that there are 0 indexed pages but a Site: search on Google shows 26 webpages indexed. I've only seen GWM display a 0 index for websites with a ton of render blocking code (Usually ones that hire sub-par web developers who use default WP templates), but in this case only 2 webpages have error messages from pagespeed about render blocking block.

Does anyone have an idea as to what is causing the disconnect in data? Could those 2 webpages be effecting the data that gets passed to GWM by not showing any indexing but not effect Google actually indexing the website on the search engine?

I did read some past questions (such as here and here) but I found my situation to be different than all of the Google index count questions I've read.

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  • As long as you don't have a history of 26 indexed and then 0 in WMT then It's nothing to worry about WMT is often out of date and yes can be several weeks to even a month.
    – Simon Hayter
    Commented Jan 10, 2016 at 17:14

1 Answer 1

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The results number which Google shows on the SERP page is not the number you an relate on - it is an estimation based on unknown factors.

The number of indexed pages you can better relate on is shown in the search console under https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/index-status

To make your site: searches more clearly, you should you additional search parameters like site:example.com inurl:www or -inurl.www

With current setup you will most probably run into duplicated content issue, because the setting www/non-www doesn't prevent indexing of both site versions.

To avoid duplicated content you should redirect all requests to your preferred version. If running Apache, your htacess rule for this should be like:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
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  • The web developer already set up the www to redirect to the non-www and I've verified. I did a duplicate content check and It found 4 external duplicate content pages which are websites for the same niche and related product with the same set up for the web page I checked (home page)
    – Memj
    Commented Jan 10, 2016 at 17:12

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