"Results 1 to 35 of about 4" - what causes it ?

Interesting post by a senior member in webmaster world

"Two days ago a new CMS went live that replaces an old one that had loads of canonical problems. Some content pages had upwards of 4 or 8 different URLs indexed, and some content pages could be returned for a near infinite number of different URLs.

The old CMS used horrible dynamic parameter-driven URLs and the new one uses short folder-like URL formats, and *all* canonicalization factors have been taken into account.
There are a lots of sites to be moved over to the new CMS, but we started with the smallest -- so small that it doesn't really need a CMS (except that using the CMS has made it very easy for the owner to keep it updated).
The site was already fully indexed, and some content pages show under multiple URLs, because basic non-www to www canonicalisation and so on was only added a few months ago. Many of the really old non-canonical URLs are also still listed.



Now that the new CMS has been installed, and the old content reinstated, most of the old URLs in the SERPs (actually all except domain root) are now 301 redirects (from long and horrible dynamic, to short folder-look alike URLs).
Last night Google reported "1 to 35 of about 8" for a site:domain.com search.
Today it shows "1 to 35 of 4". None of the new URLs are showing up yet (I expect they will in the next 24 to 36 hours).
So, their internal system "knows" that most of the URLs they already had are now redirects, and it seems that those URLs aren't now included as a part of the "site count" (the "of nnn" number).
I would guess that the URLs that now redirect are already moved over to Supplemental.
Hence... "1 to 35" - what we are showing you "of 4" - how many URLs that we think are "real" (200 OK).
Now I understand a bit more, I think.
I would expect the new URLs for content to start appearing tomorrow, or soon after. "

Labels: Google