Does the order of results from "site:www.example.com" tell us anything?

[PaddyDisplays]

Does google rank in order of page authority with   "site:www.example.com"  or is it random?

As most of the results of the first 6 pages for our site  are internal search results pages ( eg www.example.com/search/product-results)
The fact that search results are index at all is frustrating, they are not linked to internally or externally.  The open site explorer does not have any back links for any of the search pages, and I checked the submitted site map and no search urls are submitted, so I don't know how google are finding the search urls.  Also tested some of the search urls with aherf and no back links.

But since its ranking the search pages ahead of the category(landing) pages with "site:" has me worried that not only are they indexing the urls, but they giving them higher page authority

[GregB123]

I asked this also a couple month ago and got a good answer here:

http://moz.com/community/q/when-googling-site-mydomain-com-what-does-listing-order-tell-us

[artdivision]

What Gregory said plus its site:domain.com you dont put the www

[Chris.Menke]

I was just watching a site:domain search for a very small site in the process of being optimized.  In fact only a single internal page was being optimized to start with.  On that page, the meta data and the copy was changed and on the homepage, the anchor text for a link to that page was changed--that's it. On the day those changes were indexed, the optimized page went from page 3 in the serps for site:domain search to page 1 in the serps for the site:domain search.

My feeling is that the order has to do with Google's determination of how closely (well) related pages are to Google's understanding of the domain's core concept.  I think that determination takes into account on-page and off-page factors pertinent to each page.

If you're search pages are outranking your category pages, it would indicate that you need to do some work developing the value of those category pages.

[PaddyDisplays]

Ok that makes sense, the  internal  search results pages have the domain name in the meta description, so that is why its showing them first.  When I do site:example.com keyword  then my landing pages come first, then the search pages ( thank god)

Now I just have to work out why its picking up the search pages in the first place

[PaddyDisplays]

what Matt-Antonino  said in the other thread makes more sense, as I said above, the domain is in the meta description of the search pages ( and not in the landing pages).  once I put a keyword into the site: search then my landing pages are ranking first

[Chris.Menke]

Makes sense  to me too and that is nice to know, but that's giving Google a keyword against which it can measure the value of particular pages vs. Google measuring the value of those pages against what it's concept of the domain is in general. Each way provides different insight but use of the keyword didn't exactly answer your original question.

[PaddyDisplays]

On every result on the first 6 pages the domain name is in either the meta title or meta description  ( Bar the very first result which is the homepage).  The landing pages do not have the domain name in them,  So Matt's point that "site:domain.com" is really "site:domain.com domain.com"  makes a lot of sense.

Also a good few of my landing pages are ranking, while 95% of the search pages ( that are on the first 6 pages) are not ranking ( 5% that do rank were once link to from the main site , which has been removed, but google is still stubbornly ranking them over the proper landing pages even though they don't have any back links anymore)