How can you get to the first page of Google search results when there are thousands of returns? Read on for insight as to how Google ranks search results found by the the Googlebot. Find out why keywords are not as key as links and unique content in Google's PageRank system.
Buyer Beware?
Why don't my web pages show up higher on the Google search results pages? That question is asked by novice and experienced web developers alike. There are hundreds of articles that talk about how to raise your position in Google Search and as many consultants touting their ability to get you to the top. As with many things on the Internet as degree of caveat emptor applies. This article explains how Google searches the Internet and how PageRank determines where your pages will fall. For our purposes the term page means an HTML document, the code that underlies what you see in the browser. When using the term document, I am referring to those files that Google is able to scan for terms and links. These could be HTML, XML, PDF and a myriad of others.
Doing the Crawl
The original, and most basic, search engine method was the crawl. Actually, the crawl is still an integral part of search engines. Crawl is accomplished by an automated function called a bot. In the case of Google this feature is called the Googlebot. The Googlebot's ongoing mission is to seek out new keywords, new links and new documents; to boldly go where no bot has gone before. The search bots scour the web for documents and pulls data from those documents which is then associated with key terms in a constantly growing database. This is the most rudimentary form of search. The early bots looked for the frequency of terms in the page and ranked it accordingly. In its early day this was all we needed for the Internet until some clever people figured out how to load terms into their pages. Soon we ended up with lots of search SPAM. Not good for the search engines or the searchers.
The Googlebot searches the URL, Title, Meta Description, and the body of the page for relative terms. This is a simplistic way of looking at it but you get the idea. The search doesn't end here though. With advancements in understanding and technology loading a page with search terms will actually send it sinking to the bottom of the return list.
Getting Promoted Up the Ranks
To overcome the search SPAM problem, Google began to develop more rigorous evaluation of the pages their bots encountered. Much of the algorithms are kept secret but we do know that certain things impact the relative rank value of a page against a specific search. Not only does your page have to make a hit at the keyword level it has to find its way to the top of the PageRank maze.
PageRank is Google's way of evaluating content for relevance. Instead of relying on the keywords found by the bot, they also rely on the links to the page being assessed. Not all links are created the same, or at least not weighted the same. Links coming in from a highly respected source, such as a university or college, will carry more weight than a back-link from your baby sister's blog. Those coming from sites in between will carry a weight value according to their established rank in the system.
The last thing to consider is the content of your pages. The Googlebot has a very good memory and if your page is like a lot of others the bot may well demote your page. So, to raise your rank be relevant, unique and back-linked. Therein lies the rub.