What pages of my site does Google rank as the most important?

[Seaward-Group]

If I type site:youtube.com into Google, are the results listed by what Google considers to be the most important pages of the site?

If I change my sitemap should this order change?

Thanks!

[EGOL]

When I do site:example.com for my websites it returns the index pages of my folder structure.

My important pages in terms of pagerank or traffic or even link structure are deep in those SERPs.

[Seaward-Group]

So the results you see are not necessarily your most important pages?

[IKT]

i am damn sure that it will definitely not change the order ..

sitemap.xml is a mean for you to tell google how many pages you have on your site, nothing more...

[RyanKent]

Your sitemap allows Google to discover your page. As long as the sitemap is valid, it has no effect on the rank of the pages.

[EGOL]

Right... they are not my most important pages.... although for some sites the index pages of their main folders could be their most important pages.

It depends how you define important.  To me important pages are linkgetters, moneymakers and traffic fetchers.

[CodyWheeler]

Interesting question - Just wondering what the application could be for the answer?

Search queries are going to be done with a keyword, which means the results that are returned are going to be the pages that are most relevant to that keyword. I don't really think you can put a standalone value on the most important page on your site without factoring in Google's primary method of relevance - the search terms.

Perhaps you could tell us what you hope to gain by learning the answer to this question and we can be more helpful to you.

[EGOL]

When I do a search for my domain name in quotations.... such as.... "example.com"... the SERPs returned come close to my opinion of "important pages".

[Seaward-Group]

I was wondering if the displayed results are how Google ranked my pages. For example my about page comes before any of my products, my products are more important.

If Google did list in order of ranking then I could find out my competitors best pages too. I know I can do mine through Analytics but I can't do the competitors.

Google must have some logic in displaying them in that order. I thought the sitemap suggested to Google what my most important pages were and hoped it agreed - from your comments I think the main purpose of sitemaps is to ensure my most important pages get indexed and then it's up to Google how important they are for SERPS.