Google's John Mueller addressed a question we covered a couple times in the past. How does Google order the results they show for a site command. So you do a site:www.mydomain.com in Google and it normally returns your home page and then all the other pages of your site. How does Google know what order to show the pages?
John said yesterday at the 39 minute mark into a hangout that there is no specific order. They normally rank the home page first and there is no "well defined order" for the rest, he said.
Back in 2011, Matt Cutts said there was some sort of ranking order for the site command. Specifically, ranking the results by PageRank order. Plus they used other factors. Then in 2014, John Mueller told SEOs not to worry about how Google ranks these results.
Now, John is saying there really is no order because it is an "artificial query."
Here is the video embed at the start time:
Here is the transcript:
When I do a site query in Google are the results presented in any particular order?Not really.
So for the most part we do show the homepage on top for site queries. But a site query on its own is a very artificial query and there's no really well-defined order within a site query. So if you do a site query and some keywords, that's easier because then we kind of know what to do with ranking. But just a site query on its own, I wouldn't like pull any information on the order that's displayed there.
Forum discussion at YouTube.
