Google Indexing Shennigans.... HELP!!!

[sjr4x4]

Hoping to pick some SEO Google brains here...

I'm stumped with our Google Indexing results.

We seem to be bouncing all over the shop. 12 months ago, we consistantly stayed at about 330,000 pages indexed.

Then in Jan this year, overnight it dropped to 80,000!! It now bounces all over the place, literally changing daily.

It doesn't make any sense, and actual traffic remains fairly consistant. So are the "site" results spurious? I know Google can display differnet results for different datacentres, but the amount of change is bizzare.

An example, I've got a screen shot from this morning that shows
site:mylocalservices.co.uk Results 1 - 10 of about 10,400,000

I've just checked again, it now shows:
site:mylocalservices.co.uk Results 1 - 10 of about 1,120,000

Last week it showed 55,000 and the week before it showed 250,000.

We've had no major work done on the UK site recently, and actual web traffic and adsense revenue remains fairly constant, which in theory should also be bouncing as you'd assume they'd be directly linked?

If any guru can offer an explanation or shed some light I'd be very grateful!!

many thanks
A very baffled Steve

 

[The Leader]

Often so many indexed pages are a lot of pages duplicated many times and when there is a reduction it just means these duplicates have been removed as they add no value. If your serps and adsense revevue isn't been affected then you don't have a real problem!

 

[surreypcsupport]

You also receive results from different results centres. Google's operation is so enormous they need multiple servers and connections to serve up the results. For this reason the results can vary a lot.

Better to look at the number of indexed pages in Google Webmaster Tools. Much more consistent. Although it only shows the number of pages from your sitemap that are indexed and by the sound of it, you probably don't have a sitemap that contains all your site pages.

 

[sjr4x4]

Better to look at the number of indexed pages in Google Webmaster Tools. Much more consistent. Although it only shows the number of pages from your sitemap that are indexed and by the sound of it, you probably don't have a sitemap that contains all your site pages.

Thanks for the response. Yep know about the multitude of different G datacentres, but indexing results seem to be currently holding steady at 1.1 million.

Site map does include all URL's, and is updated nightly. Pasted this in from webmaster tools:
Sitemap stats

Total URLs: 1,906,789
Indexed URLs: 771,548

So this doesn't tally with any indexing results.

Traffic is slightly increasing, which is obviously good news, but not as much as I'd expect considering the jump in reported pages in the index.

I have been doing some linkbuilding/forum article marketing, but I'd be surprised if I'm responsible for that many pages getting indexed.

Duplicate pages would make sense, which would show sudden spikes, but the whole recent up and down of the results over the last 12 months seems to make the "site:domain" pointless.

Is the supplemental index now merged with the main index, could that have a bearing?

Be nice to understand why it falls and rises so sharply so I can understand if its something we have done, good or bad, or something we need to do.

All very confusing :no:

 

[sjr4x4]

and today the site results goes down 55,000 results.

The bouncing of the site results doesn't make any sense. It seems this can no longer be used as a measure of actual indexing.

Sitemap stats in webmaster tools remain unchanged.. very odd and it looks like no one really knows why!