This is interesting. It tells 2 stories:

1. The power of user generated content
2. Search engines certainly aren’t telling the whole story.

1. Users are blogging on WritingUp.com. They write hundreds of blog entries each day. They also write thousands of comments each day.

Two weeks ago a site:writingup.com search revealed that google had 510,000 pages from the domain writingup.com in their index.
Today, the same search reveals 729,000 pages.

The community is growing.

2. It has always been said that search engines won’t want to index very many pages of a site that has low pagerank or that has very few links to it.

Well, with 729,000 pages indexed, google says that writingup.com has 2 incoming links.
It also has a pagerank of 3!

THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!!!

Google isn’t telling the truth here.

Want more proof?

Try a link:writingup.com search on msn:

12,158 incoming links

Or what about a linkdomain:writingup.com search on yahoo?

20,400 incoming links.

Something is wrong here.

Or, what about a site:writingup.com search on yahoo?

They only have 13,100 pages in their index. Huh?

Or, msn

8227? What? What are you guys thinking?

Why can google find over 700,000 pages on writingup.com, and msn can only find just over 8000? I mean, all the url’s on the site are clean. They don’t have index.php?somevar=somethingelse. Everything is linked to. There aren’t duplicate posts on the site (yet).

So, my point is, search engines aren’t telling the whole truth.

Also, if you’re still using what the search engines tell you as a metric of how successful your SEO campaign is going, you’re fooling yourself (or, they’re fooling you, just like they’d like to do).