Why are most of my site's pages missing in a Google site query?

• I'm using the site:mydomain.com search query in Google to see how many of my site's pages are indexed.

  However, the results I'm seeing don't seem to be showing all of the pages. I know my site has over 200 pages but Google is only showing 37 of them in the site query. Do you know why the rest of my pages aren't showing up?

Answer:

Google's John Mueller recently answered this question in a #AskGooglebot video. He says the short answer is:

A site query is not meant to be complete nor used for diagnostics purposes.

He goes on to explain that a site query is a certain kind of search that limits the results to a specific website. It's not meant to be a comprehensive collection to all of the pages from that website.

The better way to find out how many pages Google has indexed on a specific site is to "use Search Console instead."

Within Search Console you can see how your pages are shown in search as well as see the exact number of pages that Google currently has indexed.

Here's the video...

Site query explaned / Run time: 1:39