Is Google [site:] command broken?

(Posted by Jarid Lukin, Director of E-Commerce, Alacra)

For those who work on search engine optimation (SEO), one of the most useful commands on Google is the [site:] command.  According to Google's Advanced Search help page, the command allows you to search "only within one specific website".  This is useful for SEO since you can see how many, and which, pages you have indexed on Google.

However, we're currently seeing some very strange results for the Alacra Store on Google.  When searching for [voxant], one of our publishers, if we restrict the search to only alacrastore.com using the [site:] command, we're getting results from several different sites (see image to the left).  Also, when just searching [site:www.alacrastore.com] without any keywords, we're seeing "about 95,000,000" pages indexed, which is a sharp increase over the results via the same query last week.

Anyone else noticing strange behavior with the [site:] command?

Comments

[KarenBlakeman]

The site: command in Google is erratic at the best of times and sometimes fails completely. I had a query from a colleague who was trying to search the Charity Commission site (www.charity-commission.gov.uk) and sometimes got zero results or pages from anything but the Charity Commission site. On the occasions when Google returned zero results looking at the Advanced Search screen showed that Google had decided the hyphen meant we were looking for a phrase so ‘site www charity commission gov uk' was treated as a phrase. I never got zero results but other colleagues have suggested that Google on those occasions decided to treat the hyphen as a NOT command.

Doesn't explain your odd results though.

I reckon it all depends on which server Google processes your search. Sigh :-(

Karen