One SEO professional asked John Mueller about having separate indices for individual countries.
So one of their clients is in India. When they do a site: Google Search Operator, they have, perhaps, X number of URLs. And these URLs may have been indexed.
Their question was: they have been noticing many clicks from different countries, but there are a few countries where there are no clicks.
There is no abstract in Google Search Console or Google Analytics. There isn’t even one session.
But, those are in those particular countries.
But, if they do a site colon (site:) search, and their particular domain, they will see 40,000-50,000 URLs. But in their own country, they would see only 500 URLs.
That’s the usual amount of pages that they have for that particular client.
How can this be possible because they also make sure their staging domains are blocked.
But countries that have no relevant traffic, clicks, or impressions, or sessions, how can they get 40,000 to 50,000 in the site colon search operator? How are these numbers possible?
John explained that he believes there are two things at play. First, Google does not have separate indexes for individual countries.
It’s not the case that they have one index for India, or another index for Hong Kong, or whatever the case may be.
It’s really just one index, along with many data centers around the world.
For the most part, this evens itself out over time. And if something is crawled and indexed in one data center, then it’s visible in most data centers fairly quickly.
From their perspective, it’s not that there is a different quantity of pages indexed in different countries, as this should definitely not be the case.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the number is shown for things like site queries and these are not meant for diagnostics purposes.
This is not a reflection of what Google actually has indexed.
This happens at approximately the 03:59 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 1 3:59
Oh, one more question. Currently, one of my clients’ websites is situated in India. So when we do site colon, we have, let’s say, X number of URLs, you know, like these many URLs had been indexed in this particular from the nearest web server might be correct or might be wrong, in Indian location. However, I’ve been noticing many of the clicks from different countries, but I see that there are few countries where we don’t receive any clicks.
No abstract in Google Search Console or in Google Analytics, not even one session. However, in those particular countries if I do, like, you know, site, colon and my particular domain, I see like, you know, 40,000 to 50,000 kind of URLs. However, in my own country, I see only 500 or 600 URLs. That’s the usual amount of pages that I have for that particular client.
So how can this be possible because even I make sure you know, like the staging domains have been blocked. But countries which has got no relevant like traffic or clicks or impressions or session, how can when we do in our site colon something in that particular country, we get like 40,000 to 50,000 on the site colon–that particular number, how’s that possible??
John 5:20
I think there are two things. So on the one hand, we don’t have separate indexes for individual countries. So it’s not the case that we have one index for India and one index for, I don’t know, Hong Kong or whatever. It’s, it’s really, essentially just one index, we have multiple data centers around the world. But for the most part, that kind of evens itself out over time.
And that if something is crawled and indexed in one data center, then usually it’s visible in most data centers fairly quickly. So from that point of view, it’s not that there is like a different number of pages indexed in different countries, that definitely shouldn’t be the case.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the numbers shown there for things like site queries are not meant for diagnostics purposes. It’s not a reflection of what we actually have indexed, it’s purely a very simple approximation based on a very quick look at our index for that specific query.
And it can be off by several orders of magnitude. So that’s something where I would definitely not use the site colon numbers for anything to try to figure out what actually does that mean.
