Stay organized with collections
Save and categorize content based on your preferences.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Every now and then in the webmaster blogosphere and forums, this issue comes up: when a webmaster
performs a site:example.com query on their website, the number of indexed results
differs from what is displayed in their Sitemaps report in Webmaster Tools. Such a discrepancy
may smell like a bug, but it's actually by design. Your Sitemap report only reflects the URLs
you've submitted in your Sitemap file. The site operator, on the other hand, takes
into account whatever Google has crawled, which may include URLs not included in your Sitemap,
such as newly added URLs or other URLs discovered via links.
Think of the site operator as a quick diagnosis of the general health of your site in
Google's index. site operator results can show you:
a rough estimate of how many pages have been indexed
Your Sitemap report provides more granular statistics about the URLs you submitted, such as the
number of indexed URLs vs. the number submitted for crawling, and Sitemap-specific warnings or
errors that may have occurred when Google tried to access your URLs.
You can check out our Help Center for more on the
site: operator
and
Sitemaps. If you have further questions or
issues, please post to our
Webmaster Help Forum,
where experienced webmasters and Googlers are happy to help.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],[],[[["The number of indexed results shown by the `site:` operator may differ from the Sitemaps report in Webmaster Tools because the `site:` operator reflects all crawled pages while the Sitemaps report reflects only submitted URLs."],["The `site:` operator can be used to get a rough estimate of indexed pages, detect potential hacking, and identify duplicate content issues."],["The Sitemaps report in Webmaster Tools offers detailed statistics about submitted URLs, including the number of indexed URLs and any errors encountered during crawling."]]],[]]
