Site:www.tld.com rank is it a measure of googles per page importance?

[adamzski]

Hello, does the order of pages in a site:www.tld.com  search show how important each page is to google? what if the homepage is not the first result?

[CraigBradford]

Hey Adam,

I've never seen any conclusive evidence as to what the order is, I've heard some people say that it could be the order in which the pages were first crawled, the order of importance etc but to be honest I wouldn't worry about it, or use that as you basis for what pages Google think are most important.

Spend time creating a good clear navigational structure when the site is built and submit a site map, between those two you should be able to let Google and other search engines know exactly what pages are the most important.

If the first page isn't your home page, try making sure that Google isn't showing any personalised results, a good way to check is to use chrome and open an 'incognito' window and do the same search. Whatever the result I would worry unless the home page isn't indexed at all.

[Dan-Petrovic]

Last time I tested to see what impacts it was a balance between page strength, crawling date and URL length. This last one is interesting and you will notice that short pages tends to be towards the start of the list and very long URLs closer to the end.

[CraigBradford]

Thats quite interesting Dejan but as for URL length, do you not think that's probably becasue the longest URL's are usually the deepes in a websites structure? eg:

www.mydomain.com/cat1/cat2/cat3

Craig

[Dan-Petrovic]

Some of my elaborate articles have very long URLs:

1. http://dejanseo.com.au/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-pagerank-but-were-afraid-to-ask/
2. http://dejanseo.com.au/relationships-in-large-scale-graph-computing/
3. http://dejanseo.com.au/influencing-user-behaviour-through-search-engine-optimisation-techniques/
4. http://dejanseo.com.au/obstacles-in-experimental-testing-and-reverse-engineering-of-google-algorithm/

They rank well yet if you look for them in the site list you get this:

http://www.google.com.au/#q=site%3Adejanseo.com.au

speed, about, faq, inference

note that these are both pages and posts - so linked from different levels.

What do you make of it?

[CraigBradford]

Thanks,

That’s quite cool to see, I take your point, it would be interesting to test by setting up a brand new site, throw up a few pages and see what happens. Common sense would say Google should always show, home page, contact page etc but it's not always the case as we have seen.

Have you had a look at what your most popular blog posts have been to see if that correlates in anyway?

Craig

[Dan-Petrovic]

I think I'll do that test!

http://dejanseo.com.au/comprehensive-guide-to-reliable-search-results/

(scroll to the bottom).

[Dan-Petrovic]

Test Results: http://www.seomoz.org/q/seo-test-site-command-url-length