Google SITE: Comand, what does it show?

[c41lum]

We all know that G's site command is a useful tool to show how many pages our sites have listed in the index, but what else does it show?

Does the site: command show what pages G thinks are important on your site in the first positions? If so, then if your top pages aren't showing at the top when you do the site: command search does this show the webmaster that there is some kind of penalty or devaluation going on, on those pages.

On my site at the min Im noticing that pages that we really do lots of work on are showing really far down in the list when I do a site: search. While other poor low traffic pages are showing in the top positions.

[tedster]

bug - maybe complicated by their over-the-top use of nofollow for PR sculpting

[suratmedia]

Try this out: Implement microformats review,rating,persons,events in deep deep inner pages. I bet they will come way above "top level category pages" for site:query.

[epmaniac]

can you elaborate more suratmedia

[gn_wendy]

Try this out: Implement microformats review,rating,persons,events in deep deep inner pages. I bet they will come way above "top level category pages" for site:query.

nope. checked for 3 sites i work with that all have microformats.

[SEOPTI]

The site:www.example.* command which is the same as submitting a query on search.aol.com was and still is very reliable for all of my sites and it shows all the URLs which are worth exporting to AOL and which are in the main index.

[tedster]

That's a very good observation, SEOPTI.

So when we include a directory name in the site: operator query [site:example.com/directory], then we're getting a bigger slice of our total indexed URLs than what gets exported to AOL. I'll be testing that one, but it sounds VERY plausible.

[indias next no1]

my site is also having the same problem , i mentioned it in some other thread also. for the last 1 month, my google traffic low day by day, my site index page not shown in the first position when i do Site: opeartor, for most of the keywords my webpages gone to 3rd or 4th page from 1st page. can't understand the reason.

[indias next no1]

when i do site search using

site:www.domainname.com main page is nowhere i can't even find it in 100.

if i do

site:www.domainname.com/subdir

the subdirectory index page not returning.

but at the same time

if i do site:domainname/subdir without www the subidrectory index page returns first,

but even without www domain name's main page is not returning in the no 1 position

traffic is low for the last 1 month

[tedster]

The site:www.example.* command which is the same as submitting a query on search.aol.com was and still is very reliable for all of my sites and it shows all the URLs which are worth exporting to AOL and which are in the main index.

I've checked a number of my sites and they are not anywhere close. Wonder what the difference is between us?

[SEOPTI]

Strange, all my numbers are 99% close, I have checked webmasterworld and the numbers are almost identical.

I'm using this query:

Google: site:www.example.*
search.aol.com: site:www.example.com

I always see a traffic pattern, as soon as these numbers drop also traffic drops.

[tedster]

I guess my challenge with the first query happens because most of my domains have several TLDs -- so [site:example.*] returns results from all of them.

[SEOPTI]

Yes, in this case you can just use

site:www.example.com/*
www.example.net/*
...

[tedster]

I just checked another case on a small site. The Google * results are 131 URLs and the AOL straight results are 180 URLs.

It may still have a use for sites of a certain type or in a certain "condition" of some kind, I can't say for sure. Since Google never offered any documentation about this particular hack, even in earlier days, and my results are rather chaotic, I just can't use it for any actionable steps.

I am however seeing that these two queries do give the exact same results:

site:example.com/directoryname/
site:example.com inurl:directoryname

That's what you would expect, so it's good to see that stability.

[g1smd]

Google's site: command is broken, and so is WebmasterTools.

I see sites where most of the URLs listed in the "internal links" section do not appear in a site: search, and most of the URLs found in a site: search are not listed in WebmasterTools.

Between them, they list less than 30% of the site, yet WMT claims to have found ten times as many internal links pointing to the root page as there are pages on the site.

The site has about 2000 pages, but Google's WMT says the root page has 20 000 internal links pointing at it. Google's WMT lists about 250 pages as having internal links pointing at them, but when you ask to see the details of the supposed 20 000 links pointing at the root page it lists about 400 URLs.


How's that work?

[edited by: g1smd at 6:40 am (utc) on Aug 9, 2010]

[AnkitMaheshwari]

I think there can be some co-relation between the crawling/indexing in past 1 month and site: command results.

So, site: commands shows the results(pages) that are crawled/indexed by Google say in last 1 month's time while actually there can be much more pages in its index for the site.

[epmaniac]

so is there a general consensus that site: operator is broken?

my website's indexed pages continues to go down

also site: operator returns 0 pages indexed in last 24 hours.... anyone else experiencing the same?

[suratmedia]

can you elaborate more suratmedia

nope. checked for 3 sites i work with that all have microformats

I have implemented rich-snippets [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...] on 3 sites. After 1.5 months, those implemented pages went away above category pages in site: query (though traffic was the same) but after implementing rich-snippets at category level pages, everything sequenced normally.

[gn_wendy]

I have implemented rich-snippets [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...] on 3 sites. After 1.5 months, those implemented pages went away above category pages in site: query (though traffic was the same) but after implementing rich-snippets at category level pages, everything sequenced normally.

That really is interesting. The thing is the sites i checked,

nope. checked for 3 sites i work with that all have microformats

the rich snippets / microformating was only implemented on individual product/page level. Category level and higher have no microformats - since there just isn't any content there for which microformat data makes sense.

I will, however, keep an eye on this, so thanks for the heads-up.

[epmaniac]

are you guys noticing continuous decline in site: returned pages but no impact on traffic?