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Using stats from site: and Sitemap details

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
  • one indication of if your site has been
    hacked
  • if you have duplicate titles or snippets

Here is an example query using the site operator:

search result page for a site: query

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.

Sitemap report in webmaster tools

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.

Alien Road

Cómo lo aplicamos

Google announcements age. We keep this post here for the record, and we note for clients whether the behaviour it describes still applies today or has since been superseded.

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