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
-
Sudden site drop google, not banned or penalised?
Hi all, We've been working on our site weldingmart.com for a while. 4 weeks ago we got a sudden drop from google rankings even with our own brand name. No clear cause found, and decided to walk through all technicalities of the SEO fundament. thus we did the following
Technical SEO | | jkossel
-> Setup google webmasters tools
no issues found, a few 404's, few 410's sure thats all ok,
-> Setup robots.txt to only index homepages, lister pages, content and product detail pages (disabled all filters and search queries) Also we banned russian and spammy bots for performance-sake.
-> Added sitemaps, and around 14k pages seemed to be already indexed.
-> When searching for "site:weldingmart.com" i can find 14k pages.
-> we had a low 33/100 page speed score and improved this to 76/100 So we did a lot of clean up and improved a lot of items. but still 2-weeks in. we still have no ranking improvements. Before we went down we had around 100 clicks a day from google. now 5 avg. by the way i think a main issue is the low link count of course but still googling your own name should return us in top3 right. Is there something we are missing, do we need more time. I just want to verify that we do not mis anything!1 -
How do I redirect old html pages to new site?
Im seeing in my Google search console some of my old html pages. I never redirecting them and now they get 404 errors. Below is my current htaccess file, how would I changed it so that any html page i.e. intercallsystems.com/index.html forwards to my new site intercallsystems.com ? I have about 5 html pages that I want to redirect. Thank you for the help! Rena Currently my htaccess says: BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | palila
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress0 -
How to deal with Pages not present anymore in the site
Hi, we need to cut out from the catalog some destinations for our tour operator, so basically we need to deal with destination pages and tour pages not present anymore on the site. What do you think is the best approach to deal with this pages to not loose ranking? Do you think is a good approach to redirect with 301's these pages to the home page or to the general catalog page or do you suggest another approach? tx for your help!
Technical SEO | | Dreamrealemedia0 -
Site address change: new site isn't showing up in Google, old site is gone.
We just transitioned mccacompanies.com to confluentstrategies.com. The problem is that when I search for the old name, the old website doesn't come up anymore to redirect people to the new site. On the local card, Google has even taken off the website altogether. (I'm currently still trying to gain access to manage the business listing) When I search for confluent strategies, the website doesn't come up at all. But if I use the site: operator, it is in the index. Basically, my client has effectively disappeared off the face of the Google. (In doing other name changes, this has never happened to me before) What can I do?
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
Why is this page not ranking but is indexed?
I have a page http://jobs.hays.co.uk/jobs-in-norfolk and it is indexed by Google but will not show up for any keywords I try. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
Need help with home page on site
Hello! Thanks for reading in advance! I've got a relatively old site (12 year old domain) that has experienced a drop in rankings specifically for our home page. Some of the key terms that I'd assume we would rank well for are: "expedite us passport" According to SEOMOZ, our on page optimization receives a C for the termr. also, the root domain and page have decent links, etc. However; looking at Google (logged out and in incognito mode in chrome), a page on our site http://www.passportsandvisas.com/passport/index.asp ranks well and our HOME page isn't listed in the top 50 or 100. THis is the case for a lot of keywords we used to rank well for. I would have thought our home page would have at least outranked an internal page. Any thoughts would be very, very helpful!
Technical SEO | | santiago230 -
Why is this site ranking so good?
Site in question: http://bit.ly/aBvVbm Our main competitor in the UK seems to be ranking extremely good for the keyword "jigsaw puzzles" even though their linking profile doesn't seem all that great? They mainly have site-wide links on 2 of their other ecommerce sites which seem to be given them their ranking power as this equals to 100's of links. Does sitewide links on 2 sites really give this much ranking power or am I missing something?
Technical SEO | | Tonyy30 -
Redirect Flash Site for Google Only - Is this against TOS?
A photographer client has a flash website, purchased as from a (well respected) template company. The main site is at the root domain, and the HTML version is at www.example.com/?load=html If I visit the site on a browser without Flash installed, I am re-directed automatically to the HTML version. I'm concerned as the site has some great links and the HTML version is well optimised, but doesn't appear anywhere in Google for chosen keywords (ranks perfectly for brand related searches). Google is indexing the Flash version of the site, but I would rather it didn't (there's no real content (just Javascript to load the SWF) and all of the pages load under one URL). How can I block the Flash version from Google but still make the incoming links count towards the HTMl version of the site? If I re-direct Google to the HTML version, is this cloaking, and is it frowned upon? Thanks for any advice you can offer.
Technical SEO | | cmaddison0