Google Secrets – How to Get a Top 10 Ranking
Chapter 2 -
How Google Works
This chapter explains those elements of the Google ranking process that will matter
most to you. It is not meant however to be an exhaustive inside look of how Google
works – only a handful of persons at Google know this.
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.
Because this is an important concept, it will be repeated: Google uses automated
software to analyze your website – not human beings. Which means that 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?
As stated previously, a ranking on a search engine is a web page’s listing and
relative placement on a results page (also 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.
Google Secrets – How to Get a Top 10 Ranking…
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 web pages
(particularly from web pages on websites other than your own). The concept of link
quality
is important and will be discussed in a later chapter.
If your site does not appear in the top 30 for your most important category or subject,
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 can be debated how much more traffic a #1 gets compared to say, a #3 or a #10
ranking. Studies indicate that those listings “above the fold” on a results page (which
means anything higher than a #4 or #3 depending on your monitor size, resolution,
and other factors) do better than those below the fold as a certain percentage of
people do not scroll. Above the fold is anything displayed on the page before you
have to start scrolling.
Google Secrets – How to Get a Top 10 Ranking…
When Google Comes Visiting
To be listed in Google’s 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 web page to its index unless there is at least one
other web page in its index that links to one of your web pages. So don’t fret over
submitting your site to Google directly. Rather, you need to get another website to
link to your website first.
Google in the past has done two types of crawl - the
deep crawl
(or main crawl) and
the
fresh crawl
. The deep crawl is traditionally done near the end of each month and
each page is crawled. The fresh crawl is traditionally done several times a week
(daily for some sites), but only certain pages are crawled. The more “popular” your
site, the more often it typically is crawled by Google. Highly ranked sites and sites
that update content frequently (like news sites) can get crawled daily.
You can determine when your site was last crawled by looking at the date displayed
on the last line of your website’s listing on a Google search results page.
Deep Crawl and the Google Dance
The deep crawl is traditionally performed by the main Google spider, called
Googlebot
. Google updates its main index once a month after the deep crawl is
completed for all websites. (Google now tends to go with a more continuous update
although monthly updates still happen from time to time).
This process usually starts the last week of every month and continues for up to a
week. The index update is generally based on content they have
cached
or stored in
their database earlier in the month for your site. Because of the nature of the update
process, ranking calculations are performed multiple times for each page of every
site. Because of the sheer number of web pages in the Google index, these
calculations can take up to a week to complete.
During this period, search rankings can fluctuate - sometimes minute-by-minute.
These monthly fluctuations are termed the
Google Dance,
as your site’s ranking can
jump around on a search results page (or even appear to drop completely). You can
view other versions of the index on different servers at the ten major Google
datacenters by using the Google Dance Tool at
http://www.google-dance.com.
Google Secrets – How to Get a Top 10 Ranking…
Important:
It is critical that your website is up and running when Google visits you.
If your site is down, your listing on Google may disappear until the next update! The
reason is that Google thinks your site no longer exists and may remove it from the
index.
Fresh Crawl
The fresh crawl is performed by a different Google spider, called
Freshbot
. Fresh
crawls are done several times a week (daily for some sites), but only some pages
are crawled.
Freshbot looks for new pages and for pages whose content has been recently
updated. New pages are included in search results right away, which means they
can be found by visitors almost immediately, even though they are not yet in
Google's main index. Rather they are stored in a temporary index and then ranked.
Daily fluctuations in the search results caused by new pages being crawled by
Freshbot and then ranked are termed the
everflux
.
New pages aren’t added to the main index, and hence don’t have an accurate
ranking, until after the main crawl. It is not uncommon for new pages to drop in rank
once they are compared against all other web pages in the main index. This is
because the pages are then compared against other pages in the main index.
Note:
Over the spring and summer of 2003, Google has been slowly merging their
deep crawl and fresh crawl results together in addition to rolling out some other
changes. This led to a period of unpredictable or pre-April 2003 rankings for some
sites. Although not officially announced by Google, the consensus is that Google is
moving toward a continuous update, with the traditional Google Dance and monthly
visits going away.
If interested, you can check your server log files for the user-agent “Googlebot”. This
will tell 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 Secrets – How to Get a Top 10 Ranking…
How Google Ranks Websites
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.
Note:
In mid-November 2003, Google introduced a major algorithm change during
the so-called “Florida Update” that changes the way Google ranks certain websites.
At this writing, this new algorithm is still changing, with some of the effects not well
understood. It is believed that the methods and practices discussed in this guide are
still accurate, so this is more of a heads-up that changes may be coming. For more
information, see Appendix D – About the Florida Update”.
With that said, the Google algorithm can be broken down into
two
major groups of
factors:
Keyword (textual) factors
. Keyword factors involve how, where and when keywords
are used. Meaning how well your website is optimized for your chosen keywords,
and if those same keywords appear in links that point to pages on your site. Keyword
factors determine
page relevance
.
Link (PageRank) factors
. These include the quantity and
quality
of links that point
to your site. Link factors determine
page importance
and are strongly related to
Google PageRank (PR).
Very simply put, Google finds pages in its index that are both
relevant
and
important
to a search for a particular term or phrase, and then lists them in descending order
on a search results page.
Keyword Factors and Page Relevance
Keywords are intrinsically related to search terms – those words and phrases that
people enter into a search engine to find specific information. Most people enter 2 to
5-word phrases in Google to find what they are looking for. Google in turn analyzes
all pages in its index and lists the pages which contain those search terms. Each
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All rights reserved.
Google Secrets – How to Get a Top 10 Ranking… page 17 of 112
website usually contains one or two keywords that are repeated more often than
others throughout the site. These keywords dictate the “theme” of a website, and will
be discussed later on.
How well you can define the theme of your site, and how well you can optimize the
use of keywords that comprise the theme of your site, will greatly influence your
ranking with Google.
Google determines the most
relevant
web pages based on a hypertext search and
analysis of your site AND of other sites that contain links to your site. Specifically,
Google looks to see if the text of a link (the clickable portion) that points to your site,
the title of the linking page, and other content on the linking page, also contain your
keywords.
Note
:
When Internet marketers speak of
optimizing
a site for a search engine, they
are usually talking about improving those aspects and elements of your website that
will improve page relevance.
Link Factors (PageRank) and Page Importance
Page importance is all about links - their quantity, quality, and strength, which we will
discuss later on. This part of the algorithm is also called the Google PageRank (PR).
Google looks for links that point to your site from other websites. Google believes a
link from website A to website B is a “vote” for the importance of website B. In this
way, other websites add votes for your website, which in turn helps increase a pages
PageRank value on your site. Each page on your site has a PR value. Usually the
PR value is the highest for the home page as most people will link to your home
page rather than another page on your site.
The more web pages that link to your site, the more important Google thinks your
site is and hence the higher your PageRank value
can
be. Moreover, it is the quality,
as well as the quantity, of links that matter – not all links are valued the same.
However, keep in mind that PageRank is but a single (albeit important) factor used in
ranking.
Sites that are highly optimized for particular keywords can outrank sites that
are less optimized but have higher PageRank values.
PageRank value is assigned after comparing every page on every site in the Google
index against one another. This is over 3.3 billion web pages! Note that
PageRank
does NOT factor in keywords or phrases used on your site.
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All rights reserved.
Google Secrets – How to Get a Top 10 Ranking… page 18 of 112
Note:
When Internet marketers speak of increasing your
link popularity
, they are
generally talking about increasing the quantity and quality of links to your site,
generally through a reciprocal link exchange effort.
Top 5 Things Google Looks For
Although Google looks at over 100 different criteria (which can change in importance
over time) for ranking sites, here are the five aspects or elements that are
currently
deemed a “must-do” if you are serious about a top ranking. There are others
elements that will be discussed later on that are also important. The following are
listed in approximate order of importance, with the first item being much more
important than the others:
1. Keywords used in the title of your pages (between the
2. Keywords used in headings (H1) and in the first paragraph of your pages.
3. Keywords used in link text, both on
your
site AND on
other
websites.
4. The PageRank (PR) value of your pages, which in turn is dependent on the
number of links that point to your site from other sites.
5. Pages that contain at least 200 words of relevant text content (and the more
pages the better).
Put even more simply, to rank high on Google, you need to optimize your website for
your best keywords, get as many important and relevant sites to link to your site as
you can, and make sure the text of those links contain your best keywords.
So let’s continue by looking at the foundation for a successful web site in the next
chapter – keyword research, analysis, and selection.
Google Secrets – How to Get a Top 10 Ranking…
