

 Why do Google+ profiles rank so highly for "site:Google.com"? - jfoster
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoogle.com&start=10

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blauwbilgorgel
In short:

Because the "site:" operator does not rank on popularity or PR. I think it
never has, and if it did, it was changed a long time ago. It merely shows you
the indexed pages for a site. You can still gather a little info from it to
see, for example, which pages are likely to appear in the secondary index /
supplemental results ("In order to show you the most relevant results, we have
omitted some entries"). Pages in index is somewhat of a vanity metric. It can
be more insightful to look at the number of pages that send you at least 1
visitor a month.

If Google would rank "site:" on popularity people would probably (ab)use it
for icky stuff like PageRank sculpting or figuring out how (internal and
external) linking influences ranking, much like they did with popular search
words /trends.

In the same vein "Link:" does not show all pages that link to a site and
doesn't order them by link strength.

If you want more reliable information on links and page importance set up
webmaster tools and analytics.

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jfoster
The first 9 results (homepage, Finance, Trends, AdWords, Offers, News, etc.)
seem to be ranked by popularity.

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blauwbilgorgel
You are seeing different results than me. This depends among other things on
your location (also probably which data center served you the result). The
number of pages in index for a large site can even differ depending on the
time of day (About _n_ results).

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g8MJKFSWJU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g8MJKFSWJU)
(Matt Cutts answers: How reliable is the site: query and why does the total
count sometimes change from page 1 to page 2?)

~~~
jfoster
Note that I linked directly to the second page of results, as that was where
the Google+ profiles were. Google's results certainly are customized, but are
you saying that even your first page of results is full of Google+ profiles?

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dkuntz2
I would think it has to do with how many other things link to the provided
pages, considering that's the gist of how PageRank works.

It might exclude the main [http://google.com](http://google.com) because
you're doing a site search, and it assumes you've looked at the index? It
might be missing most of the other pages specifically about Google because
they have a lower ranking/less incoming links than the Google+ profiles listed
in the search?

~~~
jfoster
The top profile (at least for me) is in just 77 circles. I wouldn't be nearly
as surprised about the results if the Google+ profiles were all for well-known
people and products, but the majority of these don't seem to be.

