site:mysite.com - last relevant pages rank first

[jetteroheller]

Just tested at Google

site:mySite.com

and was surprised, that the last relevant sub pages rank first in the listing.

I think I have since some month Panda.
Is this a Panda effect, or something new?

[deadsea]

Its weird for my site as well and I'm not pandalized. Its showing a collection of deep pages that have little pagerank.

Searching for "site:en.wikipedia.org" turns up the home page first, but then a random collection of articles starting with "Uniform".

For most sites that I'm trying it with, it appears to show the home page first, followed by pages that are linked to from the home page.

It appears to give much better results if you add your brand name in at the end of the query like "site:example.com example". (Assuming you use your brand name on every page). Then it returns high page rank pages first, especially those that use the brand name prominently in title, or have external links that include the brand name.

[smithaa02]

Didn't Cutts say a while back that they intentionally randomize the "site:" operator to throw off SEO guys trying to reverse engineer their rankings?

[rlange]

He had this to say back in 2006 [mattcutts.com]:

site: used to show purely random pages a year or so ago. Now site: tends to show shorter urls higher instead of a random order.

I don't know if there's anything more recent.

--
Ryan

[tedster]

From a Jan 14, 2011 video, How are site: results ranked? [youtube.com]:

We do use a few different factors...It's kind of a combination. We're trying to surface the pages we think are useful, either according to PageRank or interesting in terms of being relatively short [the URL is relatively short] so it's something that's pretty important or pretty close to your root page.

Personally, I've also noticed that sometimes the root page (home page) is not #1 - and that often correlates with a penalty or ranking problem... but not always.

[netmeg]

Some of my new sites had the home page on the bottom page or second page, but after a couple months they sorted themselves out without my having to do anything about it.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I think "site:" has become quite useless, maybe if Google cares enough to inform webmasters EXACTLY how the site command works so that we can stop guessing that may change.

[netmeg]

Probly won't happen.

[jetteroheller]

I use also

site:mySite.com search term

because with 8000 pages, I need a search engine to find pages about a theme. This command works good. No strange effects, seems to be a real search order.

[zerillos]

I think site: now shows the latest updated pages in G's index. This is based on my observations, so I might be wrong.