Is the site command reliable?

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jyciap11

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I was looking through a site on Google that I think has been penalized, but I'm more confused than before.
If I search for the general domain with the site command (site:domain.com) I can't find some pages that, however, if I search individually with the site command (site:domain.com/page1) I can find.
So are they indexed on Google or not?
Why?
The site is new, it's about 1 month old.

I tried with another site and it too is in the same situation.
 
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never tried site: with inner pages (I only used the root domain), so I don't know what it does. But type the exact URL in quotes and if it shows up it's indexed, you don't need to interpret what site: shows, which is not always reliable
 
tazarbm said:
never tried site: with inner pages (I only used the root domain), so I don't know what it does. But type the exact URL in quotes and if it shows up it's indexed, you don't need to interpret what site: shows, which is not always reliable
Click to expand...
I tried to insert in google the url as you told me with the "".
If I write "domain.com/page1" the page appear.

But again, if I use the site:domain.com this page don't appear, I have only 3 pages results for the domain, but I have 900 posts.

So, the page it's indexed, or not?
 
If the page appears then it’s definitely indexed. Although I’m not sure why it wouldn’t show up under site:domain.com unless it thinks that your pages have much the same content and thus it’s hiding “similar” results?
 
davids355 said:
If the page appears then it’s definitely indexed. Although I’m not sure why it wouldn’t show up under site:domain.com unless it thinks that your pages have much the same content and thus it’s hiding “similar” results?
Click to expand...
No, otherwise the message "we have hidden some pages because the results are similar. Click to see hidden pages too" would appear. So at this point I really don't know what to think, but I think that the site command is not at all reliable.
I thought that my site had been completely de-indexed, but at this point it is not like that.
 
jyciap11 said:
If I write "domain.com/page1" the page appear
Click to expand...
so it's indexed then

jyciap11 said:
But again, if I use the site:domain.com this page don't appear
Click to expand...
that's why I said that site: is not always accurate / reliable.

jyciap11 said:
I have only 3 pages results for the domain, but I have 900 posts
Click to expand...
well, you'd better check all 900 individually then... or use a tool like Scrapebox (and some quality proxies, otherwise it won't work) to check them automatically. That's the only way to know for sure as - once again - site: is not ALWAYS reliable (like most things coming from google that is)

jyciap11 said:
So, the page it's indexed, or not?
Click to expand...
yes

davids355 said:
Although I’m not sure why it wouldn’t show up under site:domain.com unless it thinks that your pages have much the same content and thus it’s hiding “similar” results?
Click to expand...
might be a penalty (content duplication, content quality, canonicals, etc) or it could also be sandbox.... possibly even DMCA / copyright infringement stuff, those URLs don't show up either if they've been taken down...

But anyway, these are just guesses, we would have to analyze the site and the SERPs to know for sure...
 
tazarbm said:
well, you'd better check all 900 individually then... or use a tool like Scrapebox (and some quality proxies, otherwise it won't work) to test them automatically. That's the only way to know for sure as - once again - site: is not ALWAYS reliable (like most things coming from google that is)
Click to expand...
Do you have any tutorial how to use scrapebox? I'm interested on this.
Thanks!
 
Btw, I'm also testing other pages that I found on GSC "currently crawled, not indexed".
many of them results indexed with the command "site:domain.com/singlepage".
LOL

GSC it's a trash, and also the site command it's a pure trash.
How can we work with this kind of instruments? It is impossible to understand if a site is correctly indexed or not, it makes no sense.
 
jyciap11 said:
GSC it's a trash, and also the site command it's a pure trash.
Click to expand...
someone said last year that GSC is designed to keep us blind and confused which - coming from google - is not surprising anymore. When I first heard this I was suspicious (even though I'm one of the biggest google haters), but as time goes by I'm inclined more and more to believe this...

It has some useful stuff, though. Like, for example, the "request indexing" function, or the crawling of the website via sitemap submission. If you had a big (but still new) site with 10s of 1000s of pages I don't see how you could make google visit all of those pages without a sitemap. It might still be possible, but I don't know how so if anyone knows and can share this "secret" by all means, do it!

And considering that it's still a free tool I would say it's sometimes worth using... but only sometimes :)
 
tazarbm said:
someone said last year that GSC is designed to keep us blind and confused which - coming from google - is not surprising anymore. When I first heard this I was suspicious (even though I'm one of the biggest google haters), but as time goes by I'm inclined more and more to believe this...

It has some useful stuff, though. Like, for example, the "request indexing" function, or the crawling of the website via sitemap submission. If you had a big (but still new) site with 10s of 1000s of pages I don't see how you could make google visit all of those pages without a sitemap. It might still be possible, but I don't know how so if anyone knows and can share this "secret" by all means, do it!

And considering that it's still a free tool I would say it's sometimes worth using... but only sometimes :)
Click to expand...
I agree, the real problem is that the search engine itself is not reliable either, because if I get different results with the "site" command, something is wrong.
I was thinking it could be a cache problem, or a "server" problem, but I also checked with online tools and the individual pages are indexed, but with the site command of the main domain they do not appear.

from now on I don't control the site command or GSC anymore, I only use GSC to send the urls and the sitemap, stop.
I'm really angry, because it's not possible to do things like this.

I did some tests with some sites with the AI in bulk and I thought that the sites had all been de-indexed, but at this point it's not true. who knows how many pages are really indexed, since google doesn't want to show me with the site command
 
jyciap11 said:
I agree, the real problem is that the search engine itself is not reliable either, because if I get different results with the "site" command, something is wrong.
I was thinking it could be a cache problem, or a "server" problem, but I also checked with online tools and the individual pages are indexed, but with the site command of the main domain they do not appear.
Click to expand...
so, another tool in google's confusion arsenal then....

Although, I just remembered that I've heard someone say that site: only checks certain data centers / geolocations, and - if that's true (and since google is global) - this might justify why the operator seems inaccurate at times (it probably takes days or weeks for newly indexed stuff to appear in all of google's data centers / geolocations). Just a theory...

jyciap11 said:
from now on I don't control the site command or GSC anymore, I only use GSC to send the urls and the sitemap, stop.
Click to expand...
I don't think you should limit yourself so much, especially if you're a newbie :)

Just make use of all of the tools you have available so you can compare better and have an overall picture. And yes, I know that many SEO tools rely on the data they retrieve from google, but sometimes there are discrepancies, so it's worth looking at multiple sources if you have the time...

jyciap11 said:
I'm really angry, because it's not possible to do things like this.
Click to expand...
save your energy! You probably don't know half of the things that are about to come before 2030 when it's projected that about 2 thirds of the world's population will be gone (conspiracy theory for now, but let's hope it doesn't become true is all I can say).... and if this happens google's shady practices will be the least of our worries :)

jyciap11 said:
who knows how many pages are really indexed, since google doesn't want to show me with the site command
Click to expand...
Scrapebox knows. I've used it and it's 100% accurate, 100% of the time... well, OK, it was 100% accurate 2-ish years ago when I last used it. In the meantime, the person who had it on sale here on BHW has gone missing for the last 1-2 years, so I'm not sure that the tool is accurate and supported, but for $70 (once off fee) you can't go wrong. I really do genuinely love SB and I wish I found it 10 years ago when I still cared about SEO, you can do with it so many things that Ahrefs and Semrush probably only dream of :p
 
jyciap11 said:
Btw, I'm also testing other pages that I found on GSC "currently crawled, not indexed".
many of them results indexed with the command "site:domain.com/singlepage".
LOL

GSC it's a trash, and also the site command it's a pure trash.
How can we work with this kind of instruments? It is impossible to understand if a site is correctly indexed or not, it makes no sense.
Click to expand...
The more accurate information Google gives us, the more we can use it to figure out what works, and what's going on with the algorithm. By giving us incomplete/tainted data Google is spoiling any sort of meaningful experimentation.

jyciap11 said:
I agree, the real problem is that the search engine itself is not reliable either, because if I get different results with the "site" command, something is wrong.
I was thinking it could be a cache problem, or a "server" problem, but I also checked with online tools and the individual pages are indexed, but with the site command of the main domain they do not appear.

from now on I don't control the site command or GSC anymore, I only use GSC to send the urls and the sitemap, stop.
I'm really angry, because it's not possible to do things like this.

I did some tests with some sites with the AI in bulk and I thought that the sites had all been de-indexed, but at this point it's not true. who knows how many pages are really indexed, since google doesn't want to show me with the site command
Click to expand...
Although the site: command is trash, you can add stop words, negative words, single characters to the query and scrape in bulk. This sometimes gives you a bigger corpus of results to work with.
 
Steptoe said:
Although the site: command is trash, you can add stop words, negative words, single characters to the query and scrape in bulk. This sometimes gives you a bigger corpus of results to work with.
Click to expand...
what do you mean with this?
 
jyciap11 said:
what do you mean with this?
Click to expand...
Adding stop words or negative keywords to a search query will often help to eke out more results, eg:
Code: 
site:blackhatworld.com
site:blackhatworld.com this
site:blackhatworld.com that
site:blackhatworld.com -a
site:blackhatworld.com -b
 
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