One SEO professional asked John Mueller on YouTube about checking their site in Google using the site query search operator. When they checked their site, it only showed 28 instead of 180 URLs.
They wanted to know – why is this? Why aren’t all URLs showing up?
John explained that the short answer to this question is – the site query is not meant to be complete or used for diagnostic purposes.
A site query is a specific kind of search that limits the results to a certain website.
It’s really just the word site, a colon, and then the website’s domain.
While using this query limits the results to a specific website, it’s not meant to be a comprehensive collection of all the pages from that site.
If you want to find out how many pages Google has indexed from your site, then you would want to use Google Search Console instead.
Within Google Search Console, you can see how your pages are shown in search, as well as the number of pages that are currently indexed.
In short, don’t worry about the counts shown in a site:query. Use Google Search Console instead.
You can watch the entire video here:
John Mueller AskGooglebot Transcript
John 0:03
Today’s question comes from YouTube, and is: when I checked my website in Google, it only showed 28 instead of 180 URLs. Why is that?
The short answer to this question is that a site query is not meant to be complete nor used for diagnostics purposes. A site query is a specific kind of search that limits the results to a certain website. It’s basically just the word site, a colon and then the website’s domain.
While using this query limits the results to a specific website, it’s not meant to be a comprehensive collection of all of the pages from that website. If you’re keen on finding out how many pages Google has indexed from your website, then use Search Console instead.
Google Search Console is a free tool that site owners can use to get more information about how Google Search sees their website. Within Search Console, you can see how your pages are shown in search, as well as the number of pages that are currently indexed.
So in short, don’t worry about the counts shown in a site query. Use Search Console instead. And that’s it for this time. I hope you found this useful and insightful. See you in the next episode of Ask Googlebot and don’t forget to subscribe to see them all.
