A few weeks ago I mentioned I was seeing more and more erratic behaviour in the once-reliable Google site command. Today I noticed more strangeness on this very site. In March I had 163 pages indexed, at the beginning of April I had dropped to 138. Now I’ve dropped again to 113. But the really weird thing is that it’s not any of the blog pages that have vanished, which might be at least understandable; it’s some of the main site static pages which are missing.

Checking the internal links in Webmaster Tools shows they’re still recorded – although as has been the case for some time the number of internal links being shown is wildly wrong.

I’d be inclined normally to discount this as unimportant but I’m also seeing odd yoyoing effects in my rankings which are attributable to them occasionally “losing” the natural page for a particular query and using another page which doesn’t deserve to rank as much. Previously I’d have put this down to a page dropping into the supplemental index temporarily – now I’m wondering if they’re losing it altogether.

And Bing Too

Bing’s site command has been very strange almost since they took over from MSN. All of a sudden on this site they’re showing 102 indexed pages in the World results and when you switch to UK-only results they only show 36 !!

And people wonder why SEO’s are paranoid 😉