Does the "site: search operator" also return URLs that are not indexed?

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Fri Mar 03, 2023 2:47 pm

I have not yet experienced such a case. But saw some posts from other SEOs. And Google also doesn't mention anything in its official documentation that "site:" returns non-indexed pages as well.

Schieler · Post by **Schieler** » Fri Mar 03, 2023 2:49 pm

Let's define a few things

There's an index and then there's SERP results

The index is the system Google uses on the back end as a repository to index the entire web

All indexed pages do not return in SERP results

The site operator only returns SERP results

Michael · Post by **Michael** » Fri Mar 03, 2023 2:50 pm

It usually does not. I have seen that new pages sometimes are not listed but it seems that Google has started to notice the new pages and may have increased the rankings of other pages that were indexed before. The older pages ranking higher are similar but not exactly the same topic. But google indexing has been a little slow for some time and I would not worry about it too much.