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
-
301'd site, but new site is not getting picked up in google.
Hi I'm having big issues! Any help would be greatly appreciated This is the 3rd time this happened. Every time I switch my old site greatcleanjokes.com to the new design of chokeonajoke.com traffic goes almost completely down (I even tried out the new design on greatcleanjokes [to see if it was a 301 issue] and traffic also went down.) What can possibly be wrong with this new site that google just doesn't like it ?! I was ranking high up for many big phrase like joke of the day, corny jokes, clean jokes, short jokes. Now It's all gone. I also think it's strange that when I search for site:chokeonajoke.com the post pages show up before the category pages!? Here is the old site http://web.archive.org/web/20140406214615/http://www.greatcleanjokes.com/ Here is the new one http://chokeonajoke.com/ If you can't figure out anything do you know of anyone I can hire who may be able to figure it out?
Technical SEO | | Nickys22111 -
Wrong page ranked in Google, specific example
Hi All, I've searched for previous questions and many talk about the same problem but do not post an actual example. I am also thinking to do a blog post and a series of experiments once there is a theory. My target keyword is "Exhibition Stand Hire" and this is the target page on our site http://goo.gl/qt54lb Site appears on page 6 of SERPS (google.co.uk), but instead of this page a homepage is listed. But if I'm searching for the term using quotes, ie "Exhibition Stand Hire" the right page appears on page 4 of the SERPs. Our home page only uses the keyword in the body text, while target page is very optimised. Could it be over-optimised? I've tried mixing up words in the title tag to not offer an exact match, also i've varied the anchor text of all incoming links but that didn't fix the problem. (Hence why at the moment they all use different terms to point to this page) None of this helped alter what page is chosen to appear. Is it simply the matter of page not being strong enough compared to other less relevant pages on the site? How come many other sites rank better with much less effort? (i'm using OSE to determine competition) Thank you.
Technical SEO | | georgexx0 -
Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?
Hi Mozzers, I have a UK based ecommerce site, that sells only to the UK. Over the last month Google has started ranking my site on foreign flavours of Google, so I keep getting traffic coming to my site from Europe, America and the far east that we could never sell to, and as a result bounce is going up and engagement is going down. They are definitely coming to the site from google searches that relate to my product type, but in regions I do not service. Is there a way to stop google doing this? I have the target set to UK in WMT, but is there anything else I can do? I worried about my UK ranking being damaged by an increasing overall bounce rate. Thanks
Technical SEO | | FDFPres0 -
Site disappeared from rankings at 5th of October
Hello, I have a travel guide site at www.taylandgezirehberi.com It is the most detailed site about Thailand in Turkish language. It has 300 hundred pages of unique content that I wrote from scratch. Site was doing great at Google Turkey. I was at 2nd place for keyword "Tayland". Also I was in first 5 at almost every Tayland related keyword. I survived Penguin really good, but at 5th of October Penguin data refresh my site got totally trashed. Now site doesn't appear at any keyword at all. I suspect this maybe because of some link wheels that I bought about 8-9 months ago when I was inexperienced. Also I had 4-5 backlinks from my sites at other unique IP adresses. I admit doing mistakes, but I think the punishment was really harsh for a unique content site. I sent a reconsideration request, but got the answer "No manual spam actions found." I contacted the guy who did link wheel, had him removed some of the links. Also I used Disallow Tool and submitted some other spammy url's. This deranking effected me really bad, do you have some other suggestions that might help? Thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | gezginrocker0 -
I was googling the word "best web hosting" and i notice the 1st and 3rd result were results with google plus. Does Google plus now play a role in improving ranking for the website?
I was googling the word "best web hosting" and i notice the 1st and 3rd result were results with google plus. Does Google plus now play a role in improving ranking for the website?I see a person's name next to the website too
Technical SEO | | mainguy0 -
How long does it take for an article or a page to be listed by google
Hi, my question is a two parter. I think i must be doing something wrong. With my site map, it is set to show different section of my site while on my old site the site map listed every single article - i am not sure if setting it to each section is correct, can someone please advise me on this. The second part of the question is, how long does it take for an article to be listed by google. This article on my site was written today http://www.in2town.co.uk/lifestyle/holidaymakers-ignore-the-importance-of-travel-insurance-according-to-survey Holidaymakers Ignore The Importance of Travel Insurance According To Survey but when i check to see if google has listed the article yet by putting in the whole title, it does not come up, i even added the website name at the end and still it did not come up. This is worrying me a bit as a lot of my articles are news stories which means they are current articles so if google is not picking them up then no one else will be. can anyone let me know what i should be doing so google picks them up quicker please.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Is there any evidence that using Google Site Search will help your ranking, speed of indexing, or traffic?
I am considering using Google Site Search on our new site. I was told... "We have also seen a bump in traffic for sites when using Google Site Search because Google indexes the site more often (they claim using the paid Google Site Search has no effect on search rankings but we have also seen bumps in rankings after using it so that may just be what they have to say legally)." Is there any evidence of this? Would you recommend using Google Site Search? Thanks David
Technical SEO | | DavidButler710
