What pages of my site does Google rank as the most important?
-
If I type site:youtube.com into Google, are the results listed by what Google considers to be the most important pages of the site?
If I change my sitemap should this order change?
Thanks!
-
I was wondering if the displayed results are how Google ranked my pages. For example my about page comes before any of my products, my products are more important.
If Google did list in order of ranking then I could find out my competitors best pages too. I know I can do mine through Analytics but I can't do the competitors.
Google must have some logic in displaying them in that order. I thought the sitemap suggested to Google what my most important pages were and hoped it agreed - from your comments I think the main purpose of sitemaps is to ensure my most important pages get indexed and then it's up to Google how important they are for SERPS.
-
When I do a search for my domain name in quotations.... such as.... "example.com"... the SERPs returned come close to my opinion of "important pages".
-
Interesting question - Just wondering what the application could be for the answer?
Search queries are going to be done with a keyword, which means the results that are returned are going to be the pages that are most relevant to that keyword. I don't really think you can put a standalone value on the most important page on your site without factoring in Google's primary method of relevance - the search terms.
Perhaps you could tell us what you hope to gain by learning the answer to this question and we can be more helpful to you.
-
Right... they are not my most important pages.... although for some sites the index pages of their main folders could be their most important pages.
It depends how you define important. To me important pages are linkgetters, moneymakers and traffic fetchers.
-
Your sitemap allows Google to discover your page. As long as the sitemap is valid, it has no effect on the rank of the pages.
-
i am damn sure that it will definitely not change the order ..
sitemap.xml is a mean for you to tell google how many pages you have on your site, nothing more...
-
So the results you see are not necessarily your most important pages?
-
When I do site:example.com for my websites it returns the index pages of my folder structure.
My important pages in terms of pagerank or traffic or even link structure are deep in those SERPs.
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
-
Inner pages of a directory site wont index
I have a business directory site thats been around a long time but has always been split into two parts, a subdomain and the main domain. The subdomain has been used for listings for years but just recently Ive opened up the main domain and started adding listings there. The problem is that none of the listing pages seem to be betting indexed in Google. The main domain is indexed as is the category page and all its pages below that eg /category/travel but the actual business listing pages below that will not index. I can however get them to index if I request Google to crawl them in search console. A few other things: I have nothing blocked in the robots.txt file The site has a DA over 50 and a decent amount of backlinks There is a sitemap setup also any ideas?
Technical SEO | | linklander0 -
Google Indexing Pages with Made Up URL
Hi all, Google is indexing a URL on my site that doesn't exist, and never existed in the past. The URL is completely made up. Anyone know why this is happening and more importantly how to get rid of it. Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | brian-madden0 -
Beating big brands for rankings on Google page 1 post Panda & Penguin
Hi all, so having followed lots of SeoMoz guidelines that we have read here and standard SEO ideas we seem to no longer be able to rank for our core keywords.. and certainly not rank in front of the big brands. We're a small eCommerce company and have historically ranked Google positions 1-4 for many of our keywords (a year or two ago)... but now no where near this any more. We always write unique content for our products of usually around 300-400 words per product we include our keywords in Title, meta description and H1 tags. We include buyers guides and set up articles on the site and generally have a reasonable amount of good quality and always uniquely written content Recently we have concentrated to ensure that page load speed is above average and Google Web Master Tools page speed gives us around 80-90 out of 100 We carry out linking and have always done... in the most recent past this has been weighted towards 'content for links' to gain purely incoming links (although in the early days from 2005 we did swap links with other web masters as well as write and publish on article sites etc). product category pages have an intro piece of text that includes the key phrases for that page and is placed as close to the body tag as possible. From what I understand if you are hit by Panda or Penguin the drop off is invariably over night, but we have not seen this... more of a gradual decline over the last year or two (although there was a bit of a downward blip on Panda update 20). Now we're lucky to be on page 2 for what were our main keywords / phrases such as "portable DVD players" or "portable DVD player"... in front of us in every position is a big national brand.. and certainly on page 1 it is purely only a big brand in every postion. They don't have great info from what we can see for these keywords and certainly don't give as much info as we do. For the phrase "portable DVD player" our portable DVD accessories page ranks better than our actual portable DVD player category page... which we also can't understand? This is our portable DVD category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/portable-dvd-players-car Currently we're starting to produce 2 minute product demo videos for as many of our product detail pages as we can and we plan to host these on something such as Vimeo so that content will be unique to our site (rather than YouTube) in order to give us a different format of unique content on many of our product detail pages to improve rankings (and conversion rates as the same time ideally). So ... I am hoping that some one out there can point us in the right direction and shed some light on our declining positions. Are we doing or have done something wrong... or is it in these post Panda / Penguin days extremely difficult for a small business to beat the big brands as Google believes these are what every one wants to see when shopping? Thanks for any comments and / or help.
Technical SEO | | jasef0 -
How should i knows google to indexed my new pages ?
I have added many products in my ecommerce site but most of the google still not indexed yet. I already submitted sitemap a month ago but indexed process was very slow. Is there anyway to know the google to indexed my products or pages immediately. I can do ping but always doing ping is not the good idea. Any more suggestions ?
Technical SEO | | chandubaba1 -
Pages Linking to Sites that Return 404 Error
We have just a few 404 errors on our site. Is there any way to figure out which pages are linking to the pages that create 404 errors? I would rather fix the links than create new 301 redirects. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jsillay0 -
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 -
I have 15,000 pages. How do I have the Google bot crawl all the pages?
I have 15,000 pages. How do I have the Google bot crawl all the pages? My site is 7 years old. But there are only about 3,500 pages being crawled.
Technical SEO | | Ishimoto0 -
Why did our site drop in Google rankings?
My site's URL (web address) is: http://tinyurl.com/3svn2l9 Hi there, We operate a travel site that lists numerous tours, accommodation and activities. Since 6th August 2011 we have dropped from top 10 SERP rankings of our pages to around result number 100 (page 10) and losing massive amount of visitors via Google Search. Our Yahoo and Bing rankings are still in the top10. We need your advice and quick! The last changes we have made are the following: -redirected the non-www version to the www version on the 1st August -bought advertising with a follow link in a sidebar that is being populated across the site (+4000 pages) about 2 months ago -added a blog to the website 2 weeks ago and posted 2 posts to date. Additionally, our website structure allows visitors (and bots) to see the same listings via different URLs which caused duplicate content. This has been the case since the launch of our website about 1 year ago. To prevent this duplicate content we have placed canonical tags on the individual listings pages. Why did our site all of a sudden plummet in the rankings?
Technical SEO | | Robbern0