\n in Webmaster Tools show you the number of pages of your site Googlebot has crawled over the last
\n 90 days. We’ve seen some of you asking why this number might be higher than the total number of
\n pages on your sites.\n<\/p>\n
![\"number](\"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/kb-gorsel\/g-1a8df45811cc.png\")
<\/p>\n
Googlebot crawls pages of your site based on a number of things including:<\/p>\n
- \n
- pages it already knows about<\/li>\n
- links from other web pages (within your site and on other sites)<\/li>\n
- pages listed in your Sitemap file<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\n More specifically, Googlebot doesn’t access pages, it accesses URLs. And the same page can often
\n be accessed via several URLs. Consider the home page of a site that can be accessed from the
\n following four URLs:\n<\/p>\n- \n
- https:\/\/www.example.com\/<\/li>\n
- https:\/\/www.example.com\/index.html<\/li>\n
- https:\/\/example.com<\/li>\n
- https:\/\/example.com\/index.html<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\n Although all URLs lead to the same page, all four URLs may be used in links to the page. When
\n Googlebot follows these links, a count of four is added to the activity report.\n<\/p>\n\n Many other scenarios can lead to multiple URLs for the same page. For instance, a page may have
\n several named anchors, such as:\n<\/p>\n- \n
- https:\/\/www.example.com\/mypage.html#heading1<\/li>\n
- https:\/\/www.example.com\/mypage.html#heading2<\/li>\n
- https:\/\/www.example.com\/mypage.html#heading3<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
And dynamically generated pages often can be reached by multiple URLs, such as:<\/p>\n
- \n
- https:\/\/www.example.com\/furniture?type=chair&brand=123<\/li>\n
- https:\/\/www.example.com\/hotbuys?type=chair&brand=123<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\n As you can see, when you consider that each page on your site might have multiple URLs that lead
\n to it, the number of URLs that Googlebot crawls can be considerably higher than the number of
\n total pages for your site.\n<\/p>\n\n Of course, you (and we) only want one version of the URL to be returned in the search results.
\n Not to worry—this is exactly what happens. Our algorithms selects a version to include, and
\n you can provide input on this selection process.\n<\/p>\nRedirect to the preferred version of the URL<\/h2>\n
\n You can do this using
\n301 (permanent)<\/code> redirect<\/a>.
\n In the first example that shows four URLs that point to a site’s home page, you may want to
\n redirect index.html to www.example.com\/. And you may want to redirect example.com to
\n www.example.com so that any URLs that begin with one version are redirected to the other version.
\n Note that you can do this latter redirect with the
\n Preferred Domain feature<\/a> in webmaster
\n tools. (If you also use a301<\/code> redirect, make sure that this redirect matches what you
\n set for the preferred domain.)\n<\/p>\nBlock the non-preferred versions of a URL with a robots.txt file<\/h2>\n
![\"robots.txt](\"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/kb-gorsel\/g-a8fbff694725.png\")
<\/p>\n