I’m working on a site review for a client, and I was checking to see how well the site was indexed across the major search engines. Normally we do a site: command and skip to the last page of results to get as accurate a count as we can; however, MSN’s count is a little puzzling. When I first performed a count, it said the client’s site had 180 pages indexed (it’s a brand new site). Jumping to the 10th page, however, changed the count to 100, and I couldn’t see any results beyond page 10. Furthermore, when I tried to go back to previous pages, the count remained at 100. What happened to 180?
I’ll use SEOmoz as an example. Searching for “site:seomoz.org” returns 94,500 results:
Once I go beyond the 100th page of results, however, I’m automatically taken to the 100th page, where it says “Page 100 of 1,000 results”:
If I go back one page to 99, it changes again and says there are 94,400 results:
The counts are the same regardless of whether or not I’m logged into Live Search. Why severely neuter the results after a certain page? I can understand only showing 100 pages of results, but other search engines don’t cut off the pages *and* drastically alter the count after a certain page. This is all very perplexing to me, as I haven’t noticed this until now. Has anyone else experienced this with MSN?
