Morning Folks,
So, a mild disagreement and discussion brought up via a post my pal Phillip Lopez made on Facebook has shown that there is disagreement on several issues that I thought were clear cut and settled.
Here are the points that I’d like to discuss and get feed back from you guys on, please.
1. Indexed Pages
It is my belief, based on what Google states explicitly in a Search Console Help document, as well as in many articles across the web and from my own use of it, that the ‘site:’ search operator returns pages that ARE in Google’s index.
From Google:
‘If pages from your site show up, that means they’re in Google’s index.’
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6001172?hl=en
Now, I’m not suggesting that this search brings back every page that’s indexed, only that the pages it does bring back are definitely in the index.
I thought this was a given and common knowledge, but it does appear that there is differences of opinion on this.
Some suggest that this search operator only shows pages which have been crawled, and that they are not necessarily indexed.
Now, I’ve never seen any evidence for this.
Does anyone have a result from a site that shows via this operator, that doesn’t show up for a keyword query?
Also, surely it’s a requirement for a page to have some data in Google’s index in order to be retrieved as a result from search.
What do you think?
2. Ranking Data
It was inferred that Google possibly stores the ranking data for each and every term, against each and every page in its index, despite evidence and literature suggesting otherwise.
Now, of course, we can never really know for sure, but it is my belief, that while they may store topical relevance and cache results from previous searches, that they do not store ranking data per keyword, per page.
I feel this is highly impractical, doesn’t scale well and doesn’t fit with what has been reported by Google and others in the industry.
What do you think?
3. Information Retrieval
During the discussion on this topic, there have been some suggestions that Google some how is able to retrieve information about pages/the web, via search, without referencing its index.
I don’t believe this to be the case.
What do you think?
