Our site has about 6500 pages. These are kept up to date in our sitemap.xml.When I go to our Google Webmaster Tools account I see that Google has indexed about 6000 of our pages. This seems quite accurate.However, when I do a google search for site:mydomain.com I get back about 11000 results.Last weeks this number was around 6000 but it's almost doubled.What could be the cause of this, and how do I diagnose the issue?
How does Google have more results than I have pages?
google search console;google index;xml sitemap
First of all, the number of results shown by a site: search is only an estimate. Try going forward to the next page in the site:mydomain.com search results, and see if the number changes, or if you find something revealing (like some files that shouldn't be there).If there's really an issue, it could be duplicate content, or some non-HTML content that has slipped into the index.You can check for duplicate pages by searching for site:mydomain.com [unique string on some page] and see if this results in two URLs with duplicate content.You could also run some third party crawling tool and see what you get that way. For example, the Screaming Frog SEO Spider.