Big Drop in Index Results When Using /

[hobuk]

Hi All,

Has anyone any ideas please, when I use the search:

site:www.hobuk.co.uk

I get a huge amount of index results compared to if I put a / at the end i.e:

site:www.hobuk.co.uk/

Has anyone else had this before?

Kind Regards
Lee

[dmalani]

Hi Lee

I checked your website and I can't find any difference if I put a forward slash at the end of the URL. It just loads the same page. It must be possibly a cookie which is responsible for this. I would suggest that you clear the cookies and the temporary internet files and check if it helps.

[Charles Bastari]

It would help if you would be more specific with your question. Are you talking about results for a search for your pages that are indexed by search engines with and without the /?

Explain search. Explain index. And maybe reference some examples.

C

[Duncan Rounding]

I can see what you mean when searching for site:www.hobuk.co.uk and site:www.hobuk.co.uk/ you do get different results - although very similar - only about 5 different I think. I tried this on one of my own sites and I also see the same thing.
I don't know why, but I wouldn't be concerned it's seems much better now than when you originally posted.

[hobuk]

Hi,

When I fist did this I had a result of 1480 pages without using / but when the slash was put at the end I had 98 pages indexed - Today although the results are close, the same thing is hapening now as what hapened 3 months ago. Never mind thanks for your help.

Thanks
Lee

[Bob Isaac]

Are you referring to Google? There have been a lot of strange things going on over the past few months. Our site traffic and number of indexed pages is down 40-50% at the moment, strangely enough, since May 1st. Coincidence?

Bob

[Duncan Rounding]

I find it so annoying that Google with a little bit of code change have such a massive influence on the revenue of so many millions of merchants. Like most people I have to do what I can to improve my rankings in Google but for personal searches I use msn in preference - just wish millions of others would do the same to stop the Google monopoly. </RANT>

[PA.com]

Well I'm glad I'm not the only one.
I've just noticed that whereas site:www.piano-accompaniments.com used to yield 500 ish results (up to last week), I now get the grand total of 1.

However, when Google used to find these 500 pages, the pages were always wrongly cached, and appeared as they used to about 8 months ago despite loads of changes in the meantime. Perhaps Google is having a purge of dead site page links at the moment, which may be a good thing if it makes indexing more accurate in the long-term.

My site traffic is also down about 30% since start of May, probably due to the fact about 10 of my pages that used to regularly appear for certain search terms have completely disappeared from the results lists.

[PA.com]

Interesting link here about some of Google's recent issues.