How Google Ranks Pages

Google uses a sophisticated and proprietary algorithm for ranking Web sites that
uses over 100 different criteria in the calculation, each of which is given a specific
weighting which can change over time. Because the algorithm can change, specific
techniques that used to work well may no longer work as well over time. This is
important to remember when your site’s ranking seems to change for no apparent
reason. For this reason, optimizing your site should not be considered as a one-time
task. You should always try, test, and refine your efforts.

ranked sites and sites that update content frequently (like news and blog sites) get crawled daily

If interested, you can check your server log files for the user-agent “Googlebot”. This
will tell you when Google crawls your site. You can also check by IP address
although this method is not as accurate as Google uses different IP addresses for
their robots, which can change over time.

Google updates its main index more or less continuously although major “updates”
still happen several times a year. These major updates correspond to major ranking
algorithm changes. These updates have all been named – you may have heard
about Florida, Bourbon, Allegra or Jagger in the forums.

 For new websites, I advise you to make your site live as quickly as possible, even
before you are completed. Given that Google prefers sites that are older, it no longer
makes sense to wait until every "i" is dotted and "t" is crossed before going live with
a new site. Instead, create an overall skeleton of your site, with a reasonably finished
Home page and other important pages and make it live. Add new content, or update
the content, on at least a monthly basis. Google also prefers sites that add or update
content regularly.

This strategy has to do with what is called the Google Sandbox or the aging factor.
The Sandbox is a set of filters applied to new websites whereby the site cannot rank
well (or at all) for any competitive keywords for 6 – 24 months. Also called the aging
delay. New sites can rank well for very niche, unique keyword phrases, such as their
company name, but that’s about it. It is for this reason that new sites need to be
made live on the Web as soon as possible in order to “start the aging clock”.


Important: It is critical that your website is up and running when Google visits you
by following a link from another site. If your site is down, your listing on Google may
disappear until the next update! The reason is that Google thinks your site doesn’t
exist and may remove it from the index after a couple of attempts.

When Google Comes Visiting

To be listed in Google’s search database (or index), Google visits your site using
automated programs called robots or spiders. Such programs “read” each and every
page of your website, starting typically with your home page and then following each
link to all other web pages on your site. When a search engine robot or spider visits
your site, it is said to crawl or spider your site.

Important: Google will not add a new web page to its index unless there is at least
one other web page in its index that links to that page. So don’t fret over submitting
your site to Google directly. Instead, you need to get another website to link to your
website first.

Website crawls are performed by the main Google spider, called Googlebot. The
more “popular” your site, the more often it typically is crawled by Google. Highly

the fold. Above the fold is anything displayed on the page before you have to start scrolling downward

A recent study provides some interesting numbers on the subject of ranking vs.
percentage of clicks for that position. This study tracked the number of times people
clicked on a listing on Google for a given search query:

First Page:
1st position: 30%
2nd position: 15%
3rd position: 7%
4th position: 5%
5th position: 4%
6th position: 4%
7th position: 2%
8th position: 2%
9th position: 3%
10th position: 5%

Second Page:
1stt position: 6%
2nd position: 4%
3rd position: 2%
4th position and beyond <1%

As you can see, if you aren’t on the first two pages, you might as well forget getting
clicked. When was the last time you went to the third page of a search query versus
just starting a new search query?

How Google Works

This chapter explains those elements of the Google ranking process that will matter
most to you. It is not meant to be an exhaustive inside look of how Google ranks
pages – only a handful of persons at Google know this closely-guarded information.

Google, like other search engines, uses automated software to read, analyze,
compare, and rank your web pages. So you need to know what elements and factors
Google cares about, and how important these factors are in relation to each other.

This is an important concept: Google uses automated software that looks at code
and text, not human beings. This means the visual elements of your website that
may matter to you – like layout, color, animation, Flash, and other graphics, are
ignored by Google. The Google search engine is like a blind person reading a book
in Braille – anything that is graphical, spatial, or visual in nature is simply not seen.

As such, you need to start thinking like the Google search engine.


So What Is a Ranking?

A ranking on a search engine is a web page’s listing and relative placement on a
results page (known as a SERP) for a certain search query. As an example, if you
type “house plans” into the search box at Google, you will get those listings displayed
(10 listings per page by default) that Google deems most relevant to the search
phrase house plans, sorted in order of relative importance.

The most relevant and most important web pages are listed in descending order.
For Google, page relevancy is dependent on how well a web page “matches” a
specific word search. Page importance on the other hand is dependent on the
quality and quantity of links that point to your web page from other websites. The
concept of link quality is important and will be discussed in a later chapter.

If your site does not appear in the top 20 for your most important keywords (search
terms), you might as well forget getting much traffic from Google or from any other
search engine. Because many people never go past the first page for a search
result, you really need to be in the top 10.

It is debatable how much more traffic a #1 ranking gets compared to say, a #3 or a
#10 ranking. Those listings “above the fold” on a page (anything higher than #4 or #3
depending on your monitor size and resolution) do get clicked more than those below

The Importance of Google

So why a special guide just on Google? Aren’t there hundreds of search engines out
there that need to be worried about? There are many other search engines, but
Google is the most prominent, most used, and most important of them all.

Google also currently provides search results to other “partner” search engines and
directories. This means a # 1 ranking on Google will most likely land you a # 1
ranking on these partner sites as well! I say “likely” because the partner sites tend to
blend their results a little bit so the rankings across the partners may not be exact.

Specifically, a # 1 ranking on Google for a specific search term also means a # 1
ranking on AOL, Netscape, Earthlink, CompuServe, Lycos, iWon.com, Go.com and
AT&T Worldnet!

With its partners included, Google alone is responsible for powering over 70% of all
search engine traffic to websites.

Clearly, Google is where you need to focus your website promotion efforts first. After
you have applied the techniques discussed, have monitored your results, and then
refined your efforts over time, you should start seeing dramatic results. The two other
major search engines of importance – Yahoo and MSN Search, look for the same
things as Google in terms of ranking sites. So if you get it right for Google, you have
also gotten it right in general for the other search engines

Google and Keywords

This section of the book lays the foundation for all your work. You must understand
the concepts and perform the tasks discussed here, even if you feel they are basic or
you know them.

The first chapter deals with how Google works, while the second chapter discusses
the important concept of keywords and how they form the basis of your success with
Google.

Before we continue, there are a few terms that you should know. These terms are
the most often misunderstood by beginners. There are other terms you’ll need to
know, but let’s get through these first.

Rank, ranking: a website’s actual position in the free (unpaid) section of a search
engine results page for a search term. It is meaningless to speak of website rank
without specifying what search word or phrase you are ranked for. When someone
says to you “My website is #1 on Google”, you need to ask “OK, but for which search
term?”

PageRank: Google’s patented system for specifying a web page’s importance,
PageRank (PR) is a single, albeit important, factor that influences ranking. Many
people confuse a page’s rank (what position they are on a search results page) with
a page’s PageRank (PR) value. They are totally separate.

Keywords: Keywords for those words and phrases that define what a web page is
all about. When someone enters a search term or phrase into Google, Google tries
to find those web pages that match the search phrase best. Some people confuse
keywords with the META “Keywords” tag. They are not the same thing.

Page title: The title of a web page is the text contained between the
<TITLE></TITLE> tags at the beginning of an HTML file and is displayed in the top
bar of a browser. It is not the first heading of a web page or any other large text that
may be displayed at the top of a web page. This is an important distinction to know.

On-page factors: SEO factors influencing rank that are associated with elements on
YOUR website, such as content, title tags, navigation links and code.

Off-page factors: SEO factors influencing rank that are associated with elements on
OTHER websites, primarily links that point to your website