How does Google rank a "Site:yourexamplesite.com" Query

[Jason-Reid]

Hi All,

Sorry for the potentially confusing title. I am trying to find out how google ranks the pages of your site when you search "site:yourwebsite.com".

When I did this with my website I was surprised what pages showed up on the first page, there were  sub-category pages in the top 5 results and top level category pages that weren't on the first page. I have been unable to find information as to how google returns these results, is it the same algorithm/factors that make pages rank highly in a regular search, or does it have something to do with how recently google crawled these pages. Any feedback would be helpful.

Additionally, if anyone has worked through a similar scenario I would be interested to know if there were any insights you gained from finding out which of your pages google returned first.

Thanks for the help!

Jason

[Roman-Delcarmen]

You are a talking about _**Advanced Google search operators: **_Google search operators are special characters and commands that extend the capabilities of regular text searches. In this case, you are referring to the operator Site:

This searches only within a given domain – delectable when you want to only search within the confines of a particular site. For instance, if I were looking for members on a social network like Twitter,

• site:twitter.com Nicolas Cage
• site:twitter.com Pamela Anderson

You can learn more about search operators here

https://moz.com/learn/seo/search-operators
https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-search-operators-commands/215331/

[Jason-Reid]

Thanks for taking the time to answer that, what interested me was the order of pages that were returned for my site when using the "site:" operator. Have you experienced any rhyme or reason to the order that those pages are displayed?

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Yes usually google display the order based on the hierarchy of the pages usually use the main menu and the internal links, but that just a personal observation In some case I saw some really deep internal pages on the first page probably based on the rank of the page.

Also when I evaluated those result each tool show me different result Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, Semruhs.