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May 22, 2006

Google's Massive Page Deindexing Just a Site Search Glitch?

There's been a lot of sites that have seen their number of pages indexed in Google rapidly decline recently. Matt Cutts hinted that the reason was that Google was gunning for crap sites, i.e. if your site or links are crap, Google will not spend much time on crawling your pages, thus you'll see fewer of your pages in Google's index.

But the Google Sitemaps Blog recently said it can mostly be chalked up to a glitch in the site: search command:

In this case, we found a few bugs that affected the site: operator. Some particular ones you may have noticed are that the following types of queries don't return the correct number of results:

  • site: queries where you type in a trailing slash (such as site:www.example.com/)
  • site: queries for a domain with punctuation (such as site: www.example-site.com)

We've got fixes for all of these rolling out in the next few days. They didn't come out sooner because we've been testing them thoroughly, making sure you don't get any unexpected surprises.

So crap sites or search glitch? We'll see, probably a bit of both.

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