13 replies to this topic

[CFB]

Hi all:
I've been lurking more than posting these last few months but I'm resurfacing to ask this question:

I know that to check the number of pages in a website, you enter site:www.nameofsite.comornetorwhatever I did this in Google and it returned the exact # of pages in my own website...then checked for another site of which I am aware of how many pages they have (9000+) and again the results came back 9000+. Also, my site is static, the other is dynamic.

I've got a possible new client who told me they had XX,XXX pages, which is very believable just by looking at their website. When I searched Google using the mentioned query...only 55 pages were reported. This site is 2+ years old so it's not like they are in the sandbox. This is a retail site that has thousands of products for sale, so the product pages do have the "add to cart" feature. Does this have anything to do with the query results?

I will mention that their URL's are very cleanly structured, for what it's worth.

I want to learn what this "strange low count return" means as far as possible SE spidering problems, etc. At this point with only 55 pages showing up, something's got to be wrong! I've read about orphaned pages. Is this an instance of it? Even if only 500 pages were reported...I'd still say "what's going on?"

I do look forward to being educated on this. I also wonder then, how do you check out the number of pages in a particular website?

Claudia

[projectphp]

I wouldn't guess it is anything major, as the site: command often works in strange ways, particularly in conjunction with teh snippets filter.

[piskie]

In Google try searching for:
allinurl: domain.com

Other SEs have a similar search such as "site: domain.co.uk" etc

[Jill]

In Google try searching for:
allinurl: domain.com

Other SEs have a similar search such as "site: domain.co.uk" etc

If you take this advice, be sure not to put the space after the colon.

[piskie]

Do they give different results with and without the space ??

[linux_lover]

Yup

[qwerty]

Try randomly picking a few pages that don't show up in the results of the site: search and see if Google has a cached copy of them. If any of them do, it would indicate that the site: search just isn't reporting complete results.

[adybee]

have you tried using xenu linksleuth to check how many links your client actually has? This will check how many links are oprphaned in your site - bear in mind that if you have xx,xxx links it will take some time to check.

[LazySEO]

have you tried using xenu linksleuth to check how many links your client actually has? This will check how many links are oprphaned in your site - bear in mind that if you have xx,xxx links it will take some time to check.

Yeah, Xenu works well even though it's slow. Another good program I use is GSite Crawler by GSoft (I think). It's slow if you have a lot of links, too, but it gives you a nice Google Site Map at the end.

[CFB]

Thank you everyone for the information.

DUH me...I had tried the allinurl query but had mistakenly inlcuded "www.". Using this correctly, Google shows 9,270 pages.

Jill: not to challenge or argue with you at all, but since you said to "be sure not to put the space after the colon" just for the heck of it out of curiousity I searched both ways and the same (9,270) results were returned. So maybe a space doesn't make a difference?

Another question: alright...so now I have a result of 9,270 pages. But the client says "we've got 50,000+ pages". How do I really investigate this? How do I determine if they're just totally over-exaggerating, if they are correct, or if the Google result of 9,270 is much closer to the actual page count?

If they're coming to me for SEO purposes, though I'm not going to be personally working on each and every page...I'd still like to know the page-size of their website. I do need this bit of information.

Claudia

[Jill]

Jill: not to challenge or argue with you at all, but since you said to "be sure not to put the space after the colon" just for the heck of it out of curiousity I searched both ways and the same (9,270) results were returned. So maybe a space doesn't make a difference?

Feel free to challenge or argue with me anytime. That's not a problem!

It's good that they're showing the same results now for that. There are times, and perhaps it's with other commands such as the link: one, where they don't do the same thing. It's usually a good idea to do it without the space as I believe that's the true command.

[qwerty]

It has always been different, and I just tested it -- it's still different. The site operator requires that you not use a space. A search for site: domain.com will look for pages that contain "site" and "domain.com".

Same thing with link. I got an email yesterday morning from a client with links to a couple of searches that he thought indicated that a competitor had a lot more links than he did. Nope.

[Michael Martinez]

Another question: alright...so now I have a result of 9,270 pages. But the client says "we've got 50,000+ pages". How do I really investigate this? How do I determine if they're just totally over-exaggerating, if they are correct, or if the Google result of 9,270 is much closer to the actual page count?

Google doesn't necessarily index every page on every domain.

You can find out how many pages each major search engine (Ask, Google, Windows Live, and Yahoo!) has indexed independently of the others and guess that the largest number may be correct. However, with dynamic content sites, often the same content shows up on multiple transient URLs. Since you don't say what kind of site this is, it's hard for people to give you much useful advice.

The chief reason Google would not index many pages on a large content site is a lack of trusted backlinks to the deep content. That is becoming more of an issue now (and has, in my opinion, been more of an issue since about a year ago).

[Keith Cash]

Those are a lot of webpages for a site, the sitemap must be over loaded.

Cheers