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up vote 3 down vote favorite

When visiting a new site I'd like to see the most visited pages instead of browsing through the new ones.

Is that possible with a Google command similar to "site:whatever.com"?

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Gosh...I hope not. Seems like an easy way for someone knowledgable enough to write their own content to steal page views away from those sites. (Not implying here that this was the reason behind your question) – mahnsc Oct 9 '11 at 15:54

3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

No, it isn't.

Google can't know which is the most visited page of a website. It can try to guess it if you are using Google Analytics. It can also guess it from the clicks on a SERP page, but it can't be accurate because the only way to know the most visited page for a website is to get access to server logs.

Last but not least, even if Google knows about it because of Google Analytics, it's a private information it can't disclosure.

You can somehow guess the most important pages according to Google if Google is displaying sitelinks for that site. Also, if you search for site:whatever.com the list of pages is likely to be ordered by relevance.

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up vote 1 down vote

Although no one except the site owner can know for definite which pages are visited most, search engines and other sources can have a very good guess - most websites are found through a Google search.

Using site:example.com tends to show the most popular pages first, although it varies quite a lot.

One source that may be useful for bigger websites is alexa.com. If you look up a website's info it lists "high impact search queries" which from my experience is fairly accurate. You can search those terms and see where the site in question comes.

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This doesn't work. You're ignoring repeat readership that would be going straight to the site. It would at best find what pages are most popular via search, which is very much not the same thing as the objectively most-visited pages. – Su' Oct 9 '11 at 20:16
@Su It does depend on the site and how much real-world advertising they do. But in my experience the two are parallel: the most popular pages via search correspond to the most popular pages visited by repeat users. – DisgruntledGoat Oct 9 '11 at 21:03
up vote 0 down vote

Not via a Google search, but some analytics services, eg. SiteMeter. make it possible for site owners to have their stats be public. If they have, and provide a bug/link somewhere you can get at it, you'd be able to see this information.

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