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Matt Cutts of Google posted a video on YouTube named How are site: results ranked? It answers a question many SEOs have wondered about for a while. When you do a site:www.domain.com command in Google, how does Google decide which pages to rank first? Is there some type of order to the ranking of the site command results in which SEOs can get some insight into the important and weight of those pages?
The answer is yes and no.
Here is the video:
An ongoing WebmasterWorld thread was updated by Tedster, WebmasterWorld's administrator. I was going to spend the time to type up my notes on Matt's video here, but Tedster did a great job with it. He summed up the video for those who can't watch it.
- "We do use a few different factors."
- "We do use some version, roughly, of PageRank, but it's not exactly in PageRank 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 pages or maybe one directory down."
- "It's not the case that it's strictly in PageRank order, or anything like that at least the last time I checked."
- "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."
So it does seem like Google does rank the pages in some type of order of importance. I doubt anyone is surprised by this, but this may be the first confirmation of such.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Jonathan Leplang
01/26/2011 02:16 pm
It's often a "yes and no" with Google ;)
Winooski
01/26/2011 03:49 pm
I don't know what Search Engine Roundtable's threshold for comment spam is, but Prodigyconsultants definitely just exceeded mine. Here's a vote to delete those unrelated links in the comment, if not the entire comment altogether.
Barry Schwartz
01/26/2011 03:51 pm
Done. Sorry.
David C. Minchala
01/26/2011 05:20 pm
haha, "yes" with a "but..." or "no" with an "except when..."
Tarig Mubarak
01/26/2011 05:50 pm
Thanks for the aricles. i do not quite understand how things are measured as on our HIWAAR charity ORGANISATION, www.hiwaar.com we have different page ranks for different pages. I mean the inner pages
Vivek Parmar
01/26/2011 06:26 pm
Common user or blogger never look out on site results, they only focus on how many backlinks you have on your site. More frequently google changes it algorithm so it is hard to keep everything updated with you
LaurentB
01/27/2011 12:03 am
No Matt, this doesn't help ! It's just another proof that what's inside your index and what you display are not the same. Why is Google so afraid of REAL transparency ?
Melissa
01/28/2011 02:31 am
that yellow background is just awful. poor matt just got dorkier. and no matt, didn't help a whole lot. nice try though.