Difference between index status, indexed and Site:domain

[indiainfo]

Hi,

Index status in webmaster shows the no.of pages indexed in a site where as in sitemaps shows the no.of webpages submitted and no.of paged indexed. But the count of indexed pages showing different in Index status and sitemaps (indexed). Not only those two, If we use site: domain then we will get indexed pages here count of indexed pages showing different. In all the three areas showing different indexed urls. Can anyone explain the difference?

[damponting44]

Hi guys, I'm rather new to SEO, tried my best to look for resources before asking question here. Apologising first for any shallow question.

The thing is in webmaster tool, under "google index" - "index status",  I can see 65 of my URL has been indexed, and when I do a "site:domain name" search in google, it shows 54 pages in the result. There are some discrepancy but I'm Ok with it though.

My real concern is the sitemap status, it shows 64 URL submitted, not 0 of them were indexed. I did have a fully indexed sitemap status 2 weeks ago, until I did some major changes to the URL  format to make it more user friendly.  Although I've resubmitted the sitemap a few times and have made sure the URL contains are the updated version, they just won't get updated.

On top of that, I'm receiving periodical crawling error of my old URLs ( I've created 301 redirect for them respectively), that shows somehow Google bot is still crawling into the out dated URL instead of the updated ones, I'm not sure if it's related to the sitemap index status.

My biggest concern is, does the sitemap URL index status affect my site ranking & searching response, despite the pages have been indexed by Google?

Sorry for the long post, any help will be greatly appreciated.

[apwebsolutions]

I find that the site:domain test is more accurate in showing the number of indexed URLs for a website. Google's WMT always seems to be a bit behind on reporting the actual numbers.

[pablohunt2812]

I'll start with  your biggest concern "does the sitemap URL index status affect my site ranking & searching response, despite the pages have been indexed by Google? >> No, it does not
Long answer: Submitting a Sitemap through Google webmaster Tools helps us better understand the structure of your website and sometimes discover URLs that we wouldn't have caught through the normal crawling process. However, A Sitemap does not guarantee that Google will crawl or index all the URLs your referenced in it. It is just a hint.

Now, about your real concern "the sitemap status,[...] shows 64 URL submitted, not 0 of them were indexed" >> All the URLs listed in your XML Sitemap are non www. and they all permanently redirect to the www. version (which is your preferred domain). That explains why these specific URLs are not indexed.
In order to fix that, you'll need to specify the right URLs with www., resubmit your Sitemap and wait for it to be processed again.

Regarding Crawl error, you may want to read this blog post: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ch/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html

I hope the above explanations will be helpful.