In mid-2012 Google announced a new tool in Webmaster Tools that allows you to view the Index Status of your website.  This tool gives you the ability to view a few interesting metrics related to how Google is indexing your website:

• Total Indexed
• Ever Crawled
• Blocked by Robots
• Not Selected

You can learn more about each of these metrics on Google’s Help Page.

With the tool being out now for a few months, we decided to compare the values found by performing a “site:” search in Google vs the number provided by looking at Total Indexed in Google Webmaster Tools.

For our review, we took a sampling of (10) sites we are working on, and reviewed the difference between the two methods. We looked at sites ranging from 70 to  over 12 million indexed pages.

Overall, we saw a trend of “site:” search showing 15-30% more pages than the Total Indexed metric.

We did, however, see one extreme outlier showing a more dramatic difference between the two values. This domain shows 12.1 million pages indexed for the Total Indexed metric in Google Webmaster Tools, but only 2,450,000 in a Google “site:” search.

Has anyone else noticed this variance?  Share your numbers with us in the comments!