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
-
My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.
Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages. I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google.
Technical SEO | | ChophelDoes anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
{YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
{HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php0 -
Site being indexed by Google before it has launched
We are currently coming towards the end of migrating one of our retail sites over to magento. To our horror, we find out today that some pages are already being indexed by Google, and we have started receiving orders through new site. Do you have any suggestions for what may have caused this? Or similarly, what the best solution would be to de-index ourselves? We most recently excluded anything with a certain parameter from robots.txt - could this being implemented incorrectly have caused this issue? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
NoIndex/NoFollow pages showing up when doing a Google search using "Site:" parameter
We recently launched a beta version of our new website in a subdomain of our existing site. The existing site is www.fonts.com with the beta living at new.fonts.com. We do not want Google to crawl the new site until it's out of beta so we have added the following on all pages: However, one of our team members noticed that google is displaying results from new.fonts.com when doing an "site:new.fonts.com" search (see attached screenshot). Is it possible that Google is indexing the content despite the noindex, nofollow tags? We have double checked the syntax and it seems correct except the trailing "/". I know Google still crawls noindexed pages, however, the fact that they're showing up in search results using the site search syntax is unsettling. Any thoughts would be appreciated! DyWRP.png
Technical SEO | | ChrisRoberts-MTI0 -
How is a dash or "-" handled by Google search?
I am targeting the keyword AK-47 and it the variants in search (AK47, AK-47, AK 47) . How should I handle on page SEO? Right now I have AK47 and AK-47 incorporated. So my questions is really do I need to account for the space or is Google handling a dash as a space? At a quick glance of the top 10 it seems the dash is handled as a space, but I just wanted to get a conformation from people much smarter then I at seomoz. Thanks, Jason
Technical SEO | | idiHost0 -
Site wide search v catalogue search
I have a client building a new web site who has agreed that a site search function is a good thing in order to get a view on how customers are using the site, the search terms they are using as a source of keywords etc. The problem is the developer has implemented a catalogue/product search which only queries the products in the database. On the one hand this is fine in that the search is directing users to products and not to other areas of the site. But the customer is disappointed that the search is not site wide. Are there any solutions where third party search utility could be implemented whithin the site which will search both? The ecommerce platform is Magento. Any views would be very helpful!
Technical SEO | | k3nn3dy30 -
Www or no www
right now our organization has the a robot text file set to block search engines from indexing the non-www version of our URL - example.com looks like this #Dynamically generated robots.txt file for example.com
Technical SEO | | dschreib_greenpeace.org
User-agent: * Disallow: / Of course, we do allow search engines to crawl the www. version Is this the best way to do this?0 -
How much of an issue is it if a site is somehow connected to a site that was penalized by Google?
I am working with someone that is about to launch a new site, and one of the sites was affected by the Panda update. Does it matter if the two sites are connected? Share the same hosting provider and same Google Webmaster's account?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Should we use Google's crawl delay setting?
We’ve been noticing a huge uptick in Google’s spidering lately, and along with it a notable worsening of render times. Yesterday, for example, Google spidered our site at a rate of 30:1 (google spider vs. organic traffic.) So in other words, for every organic page request, Google hits the site 30 times. Our render times have lengthened to an avg. of 2 seconds (and up to 2.5 seconds). Before this renewed interest Google has taken in us we were seeing closer to one second average render times, and often half of that. A year ago, the ratio of Spider to Organic was between 6:1 and 10:1. Is requesting a crawl-delay from Googlebot a viable option? Our goal would be only to reduce Googlebot traffic, and hopefully improve render times and organic traffic. Thanks, Trisha
Technical SEO | | lzhao0