Google site command hallucinating

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Check out your page count at Google using the site: command and you’re likely to see some very interesting results. Pages are dropping out, and there’s no guaranteed pattern why. This is one of the baffling occurences that has surrounded Google in the last few months. Google seems to have trouble in the following areas:

1) Indexing pages right in the first place, especially websites that don’t redirect www traffic to non-www.
2) Keeping pages that are already known in the index. Pages “drop out” all the time, and for no seeming reason
3) Keeping copies of extremely old pages in the index, that have been removed from the internet based on instructions from the webmaster

These problems are wide-spread, and have been reported by numerous webmasters in numerous public forums, yet Google has been very quiet to comment.  This is common for Google.  Communication is one-way and infrequent from Google to webmasters, so naturally many webmasters are upset to see their income plummets and to have no sign of encouragement from the company that they’re counting on to deliver traffic.  I personally am seeing a 40% reduction in indexed pages on several sites, so I’ll continue to monitor this situation for awhile.

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