This is a “101” summary on how Google ranks web pages. The fundamentals can be the the same for Yahoo and to a lessor degree, MSN Search, but given that Google is the 800 LB. gorilla, I will concentrate on them.
In the title, you will see the word “pages” and not “sites”. Rising tides do not “lift all boats” when it comes to search engine dynamics. A page will rank on its own merits, not because it may be a part of a larger web site.
Also, to rank in Google is to rank for a particular search term or key word. A web page or web site just doesn’t “rank” in Google. A photographer in Chicago may rank #3 for the term “chicago wedding photographer”. He may also rank # 7,345 for the term “chicago”.
Before I go into the nuts and bolts of the Google machine, it is helpful to understand Google’s core motivations.
In their white papers and in their doctoral thesis, the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, made it clear that links were the arbiters of web page relevance more than any thing else. If you look at Google’s web master guideline, the majority of words are dedicated to linking and Google’s idea of what is good link and what is not. Whether you agree with the particulars and specifics of Google’s definitions, the clue is hard to avoid: Google gives relevance to links.
Google is in business to make money. They really don’t care (and probably shouldn’t) care about your web page rankings and if you make money. They do not own the internet – they are just another web site, albeit, a very popular one. While millions of people have made their livings and some, fortunes, directly or indirectly from the traffic Google has provided to their web pages, Google is not the 800 LB gorilla of the internet anymore. Of search, yes, of traffic, no.
Google feels if it provides its users with fresh, relevant content, then we will in turn have a tendency to click its AdWord ads as well as hire Google to display ads on our own websites (AdSense). Google is driven to figure out what are the most relevant web pages it can deliver on any given search term in hopes to appease the searcher. If it can do this on a regular basis, it will remain the king of search. Filtering out non-relevant results to include machine-made junk pages and pages created solely for search engine spam is a daily task.
The 2 ways a page can get ranked.
A page can either get ranked by its on-page factors or its off-page factors. That’s it. Google has created algorithms to determine each, then more algorithms to combine the two. Hence, a web page’s rank is for a particular term at a particular moment in time.
On-page factors.
This is what are web pages are. The content. The titles. The inter-linking dynamics. What we publish on our web pages gives Google an idea what the page is suppose to be about. Google determines this by way of its spiders who “crawl” the web page to “read” the information. The spider can read straight and simple HTML text. It understands meta data. It understands titles of pages.
It cannot see a picture. It cannot interpret a Flash-based animation. Even if you have text in either, the text is not in ASCII code, it is a picture. To Google you have virtually said nothing. That’s why text based HTML sites will do better in the Google index than similar (in idea) Flash based sites. If you are reading this and have a Flash based site should you trash it and start over? No. Web 2.0 will help you out. Plus there are work arounds to a Flash based site to make it very visible to Google and ultimately get traffic.
Off-page factors.
Off-page factors are what the internet is doing to your page. The only dynamic thing a web page can do to another is link to it. This is what makes the world wide web. The more links any one page gets from other pages, the greater the chance that page has relevancy for a particular topic or category.
It is one thing for 2 web masters flush with cash and time to create massive and impressive web sites. They can have the “correct” structure and keyword content. They can provide for a great user experience. But one thing they do not prove to Google is the relevance of their keywords. If Google has indexed two similar sites, how is it to determine which one you would rather see, #1 or #2?
While it’s relatively easy to create a site and make it into your vision, it is quite another to have other web masters link to it. Google feels that for other people willing to link to your web site, they are in effect, voting for your page. The more links, the more votes. With more of the internet voting for your site, the less Google has to guess about your page based on its on-page factors. After all, why would a web master place links on his or her site that would lead their visitors astray? They wouldn’t. Content can be created, links have to be earned.
Links say a lot about a web page. Where the link is coming from. How many and where the linking page’s links come from. And most importantly, what the actual link itself says. If you get a bunch of links to your pottery home page that say: Illinois pottery artist, click here, all Google really knows is that web page is linking to another and saying something about “click here”. It can determine what the linking page is and that it is linking to a page about pottery, but that’s it. If that same site changed its link to: …for an Illinois Pottery Artist, click here, well Google is now told that this particular hyper-link is definitely about an illinois pottery artist. This example is about using anchor text, the actual text of the link, to properly to maximize SEO for your page.
Anchor text is probably one of the most important off-page factors that can influence your page’s ranking in Google. If you do nothing else, get a bunch of links, 50-200 with several versions of keywords you want to rank for, and you should do very well in Google.
Reciprocal links. There has been some talk about the rise and fall of reciprocal linking. Two to three years ago, reciprocal linking was all the rage. Web pages were getting pushed up the rankings largely based on their incoming anchor text links. Then Google did an “update”. This is where Google will tell you one day such and such a web page is #1 for a term. Then the next day, that pages’ relevance dropped to #67. What?
For better or worse, Google is always trying to develop methods that they think will provide accurate and relevant results after you type in the search query. If they feel some page is getting to the top position due to too much user manipulation, well they just may knock it down a peg or two. It happened to John Chow, the internet marketing blogger. For a while Google didn’t even let him rank for his own name. Now I see he ranks for his name again and all is well at Google.
I did notice a lot of the web pages that had hundreds of back links with proper anchor text pretty much stayed the same through the last two Google smack downs. I’ll almost bet your next pay check Google can’t or does not want to mess with reciprocal linking! But they say to get “natural, editorial, one-way links”. Sure, that’s fine if you are Adobe (speaking of which, anyone want to venture a guess who ranks for the term “click here” and why?) or Apple or a super blogger like Aaron Wall – who I respect very much. But just who in the heck is going to link to the local business in any numbers that will make Google wake up and rank them? “Natural”? Not in the real world…
I use a good piece of software called SEO Elite. It lets me track the back links of any web page I enter into it. It also tells me if both web pages link to each other – a reciprocal link.
When I do keyword research for a client, I find out who ranks #1 - #5 for that term in Google. Then I enter each url into SEO Elite and let it do its thing. I really only care about what is indexed in Google and Yahoo. Results are often mixed but one thing is sure: for every “ranking” page (position #1 - # 5), they all have hundreds of links which most are reciprocal. Over 85% usually. Of those reciprocal links, most have the keyword as anchor text over 60%, and on average, most of those links have a Google PR ranking average of only 2.7.
That was a mouthful. What Google says is sometimes not what Google actually does.
So much for every guru telling you need to have 1-way links from just the right web sites with high Google PR if you want to improve your SEO.
Google PR stands for Page Rank.
Google PR is an arbitrary ranking of a page’s importance from 1-10. You can get the Google toolbar here to install the PR function. Some people feel their page has made it when it achieves a PR of 5, 6, or 7. Only a handful of web pages ever rank 8, 9, and 10. Those are usually the Google’s, Yahoo’, and super blogs of the world. With the onslaught of Web 2.0 marketing, Google’ PR is becoming less relevant as a barometer of a pages real value.
It is still accurate to believe Google does not punish but rather rewards reciprocal linking that has a good dose of structured anchor text. Don’t expect Google to admit this, or the heady SEO gurus. I’m just saying…
My next post will be on the nuts and bolts of linking and how to automate it so that people ask you to link to them.