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Today's question comes from Pratheep in Bangalore who
wants to know, Hi Matt.
If you do a site colon website dot com on Google, on what
basis are the results ranked?
Is this the order in which Google gives importance to each
and every page in the website?
Because most of the time the top listed pages get
more search traffic.
Great question.
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.
Hope that helps.