Searching in Google using the Site:www.example.com specification - is it in an order?
-
Hi Gurus,
Just a quick searching question.
If you do a Google search using the site: specification eg.
site:www.example.com
Is the list returned by Google in an order of something similar to 'Page Authority' or some other order eg. page first seen date etc.
Because you are looking at your single site, is Google listing your pages back to you in it's perceived order of current 'popularity'?
Thanks,
Brad
-
Matt Cutts answered that on a YouTube video a couple of years back at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qigo05nAqKw. I've copied the transcript of his answer below.
In general, we don't promise that site colon queries will rank in the exact same order that other pages would rank in. So we do use a few different factors. We do use some version, roughly, of page rank, but it's not exactly in page rank order. We also look a little bit at, for example, maybe how short the URL is, and those tend to be URLs at the root page or one directory down, and those tend to be the pages that would attract the most links anyway. So it's kind of a combination to sort of trying to surface the pages that we think are useful, either according to page rank, or interesting in terms of being relatively short, so it's something that's pretty important or pretty close to your root page.
But I wouldn't necessarily say that, and it's not the case, that it's strictly in page rank order or anything like that, at least the last time that I checked. So it's a relatively good proxy of the pages that might be kind of interesting, but I wouldn't treat it as a perfect list. You can always go through your server logs and figure out which pages are driving the most traffic, and sometimes those are going to be deep URLs, for example, that might get a very specific link or that rank for some other reason.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How do I direct users to site page when they search vanity URL?
My company runs a contest via a landing page on our website. The full URL to the landing page is rather long so we have a vanity URL that we use for advertising purposes. I have a 301 on the vanity URL to the landing page URL so people visiting it directly end up where they should just fine. But if a user goes to Google and types the vanity URL into the search bar, the landing page is nowhere to be found in the results. What do I need to do to get the landing page to show in results when people search the vanity URL?
Technical SEO | | jarjarjarvis0 -
Google penalising my site? Ranking now outside top 50
Hey there, Was wondering if anyone could give me some advice/help on my current problems with my Google ranking. I used to be on page one this time last year (still am on yahoo and bing) but Google has pushed me out of the top 50. Since then I built a new site on wordpress with new content but it hasn't made any real difference. This is my site address: www.elvisimpersonator4u.co.uk I also have a separate blog here: www.thisiselvis.tv The blog did have some duplicate writing on it which I removed a few months back but it still hasn't improved my Google ranking. Would a 301 redirect fix this problem properly? I've done quite a lot of SEO on several pages on the new site to try and improve it but no luck so far. In fact I hope I haven't over optimised! No tools seem to indicate this though. I have no messages in webmaster tools so there's no obvious penalty, my web hosts keep saying I just need to buy more link builds and content writing from them but I've already done a lot of this and it's made no discernible difference. If someone could have a look and give me some advice I would be most grateful! Thanks,
Technical SEO | | devrox
Jim0 -
Why is my site jumping around in google search ?
Hi I've been trying to get my page up in google results and I was wondering why the constant fluctuation. For example, on one day the pages is nr. 26, the next day it's nr. 65 then jumps back on say 30 and then in a few more days it's going back to 50. What's the logic behind that ? Thanks Cezar
Technical SEO | | sparts1 -
Why are Google search results different if you are log'd into Google or not?
I get different results when I'm log'd into my Google account associated with my website than if I'm not. The same country is occurring. So how can I rely on the google results I'm seeing? For instance my site is page 1 with the improvements I made based on SEOMOZ if I'm log'd in. Yet I'm not on the first 25 pages if I'm not logged in.
Technical SEO | | Romana0 -
301 redirects tanked our site on google - what now?
We had several hundred old pages on the site with duplicate content and new pages with fresh info on the same topics. So I redirected the old pages to the new pages. Next day, plop, we're dumped off google for almost every keyword. Dang I thought they didn't want duplicate content and old funky pages. What did I do wrong and what can I do to fix it? Thanks so much for anyone who can share their expertise. Jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
Google Has Indexed Most of My Site, why won't Bing?
We've got 600K+ pages indexed by Google and have submitted our same sitemap.xml's to Bing, but have only seen 100-200 pages get indexed by Bing. Is this fairly typical? Is there anything further we can do to increase indexation on Bing?
Technical SEO | | jamesti0 -
Sitemap.xml showing up in Google Search
Hello when I do a Google search my sitemap.xml shows up for lots of queries. Does anyone have any advise on this? Should I remove url in Google Webmaster? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
"Site Suspended" in Google Adwords + Lost all rankings in Google => is this related?
Can anyone share thoughts on this: Does the S recently (mid april) we revamped our website (same content, new layout, strong brand), but a few days later our google rep contacted us to tell that she got a "red flag" for one of our SEA campaigns (we broke the bridge page policy, not on purpose to be clear), they were completely correct on this matter. We even got some extra time to correct this, normal policy is only 10 days. But, we were a little slow, so all our Adwords Campaigns are suspended and we get the message "Site suspended". We are working to have this fixed, our Google rep even granted some more time to fix this. Now, almost simultaneously, same time frame, all our new pages, that were already ranking well tx to proper 301 rules, suddenly fell out of the google SERPS, nothing to be found anymore up till now. Our website is live since 1996, no issues, up till now. There seems to be a strong correlation to what happened in our SEA and what happened in our SEO can anyone share some info?
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0