Becareful of using site:http://www.yoursite.com to tell if your site was indexed

The short answer is, the command site:http://www.yoursite.com does not indicate  if your site got indexed by Google.

Too often, you see people respond to queries like "How to check if my site got indexed by Google?" with typing the above phrase in Google's search bar. That is just misleading. Because such a querry will bring up all the URLs that have been crawled by the spider but not nescessarily mean that it has been indexed already.

To support this point, let us look at the difference between the cache and index in Google's perspective. The cache contains a snapshot of what a URL looks like at the time Google spiders it. An index on the other hand is basically a database of all URLs where it gets its results when someone makes a querry (a search). Therefore, if a site is on the list, it is easier to be included in the search results. But it does not mean that all crawled URLs are indexed.

If you really wanted to know if your whole site is indexed, use the free tool provided by Google which is the Webmaster Tools.

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