The Benefits of the Last Pages of Google's Site Search

Like most (all?) search marketers I periodically do site searches (the "site:" search query) in various search engines -- I often have SEOBook.com's SEO for Firefox plugin enabled for easy access to additional information. I've found that clients' concerns with these results center around the number of pages indexed, and whether or not both the www and non-www version of the domain name is indexed. More savvy clients may ask about other canonicalization issues.

One thing I don't here from clients involves looking deeper, and to the very last pages, of the "site:" search in Google. This shouldn't be overlooked. You can discover some things by looking at those last pages of search results that affect your entire site.

For example, on the second to last page of a project site of mine I saw this URL:

Those familiar with Drupal will recognize the URL structure. In my case, the URL at "taxonomy/term/30/0" is a duplicate of "taxonomy/term/30", and the latter is already set to 301 redirect to a cleaner, optimized, URL.

By finding the above I realized that I hadn't set the Global Redirect module of Drupal to take those "/0" extensions into account. And this instance was just one affected by that.

An obvious reason for doing this is to get a list of pages that may be under-performing. This may be due to duplicate content issues or internal or external linking problems.

Fixing these may require more digging. Use CopyScape to see if you have a duplicate content issue. If so, that will need to be addressed. Remember, these "pages" in the results may not be true pages, but actually search results if you have a search feature on your site. Depending on the size of your site you could have a large number of search result "pages" indexed.

Next, are there any links pointing to that page (here's where the SEO Book plugin comes handy)? If not, get a link to it with targeted anchor text.

SEO Book's Page Links indicator:

A few internal links can be enough, particularly if the phrase is not overly competitive.

Additionally, you may find pages that you don't want indexed. It's possible there's a hole in your security, and so these pages (which probably don't have much link juice leading to them) may appear low in the site search. I've seen pages indexed that have clearly been disallowed by the robots.txt file, don't assume the pages are actually private.

It can be tempting to perform "site:" searches for that basic info, but as you can see, you can find more opportunities when you investigate further in the results.