How Google Works
The latest numbers as of this writing show that Google maintains a 47% marketshare in the Search Engine Business with Yahoo! having 37% and MSN about 32% (numbers do not equal 100% as people use more than one browser). Therefore, it is safe to say that an understanding of how Google works is essential to achieving success in getting free traffic from them. Let it be known though that you should not rely on free traffic alone as the search engines are constantly changing their search algorithms and this can have an enormous effect on the performance of your rankings.
I use MovableType for this site and after every entry I write it pings 15 sites by default, informing them that my site has been updated. This creates 15 new incoming links to my site every time I share my wisdom to the world. It is even more helpful to have another site already indexed in Google add a link to your site. This will cause Googlebot to come to your site and spider it. When it is done spidering your site, it will put your site into Google’s index under whatever keywords it deems as relevant.
The advantage of having a network of sites as I do that is constantly updated is that the Googlebot is usually found on one of them some time or another. Quickly adding a link to the footer of a site or writing a whole entry about the site on 9rules or Whitespace quickly sends the Googlebot over to my site so that it can begin spidering its pages and indexing them.
The more you update, the more Googlebot will visit your site. Search engines believe that if you are constantly updating then you are providing the freshest information and usually these are the results that you will see that the top of searches.
Fresh produce, aisle 5
I like to try and add a new entry everyday. The Googlebot comes to my site at least 5-7 times a day going through my archives and whatnot. It is important however to make sure that Google does not index your homepage if it constantly changes, but all the pages below it. A key that I learned from Scribbling.net has to do with the meta tags. Read it, learn it, and apply it.
Note: I now allow Google to index my homepages because I like for people to come to my sites and see them when they type in their names in search engines. However, since all entries on the homepage point to the full article hopefully those are the ones that show up in the searches when people are looking for specific terms.
Now that I have the Googlebot coming to my site everyday I have been finding new users visiting through searches on Google. There hasn’t really been any strange keyword searches like “fuzzy elephant” or anything like that, but I am glad to see I am in the top 10 for a couple of different search phrases I did not even try to be in.
Why Google Places Blogs Highly in Searches
Blogs rule search engines because they are compromised of links that quickly propogate through the community. Google searches your site and follows the links. Do not link to people hoping or expecting them to link back to you. If they like you they will they will link to you, if they don’t work harder on what you are offering on your site. The more links coming to you the better. To me pagerank means nothing. This site has a pagerank of 0 as of this writing (will increase during the next update). Last time I checked Amazon was at 3.
If there is a great article written by someone and the blogging community picks up on it the links that are produced will quickly move that article to the top of the search rankings. The more relevant links, the better.
That Magic PR Number
At the beginning of its existence Google found that PageRank (PR) was it’s Holy Grail for producing quality search results. Since then, through millions of sites figuring out its secrets Google has started to place less of an emphasis on PR and more of a focus on actually producing relevant results (as you know isn’t always the case).
PR can be considered a “vote” to your site and the more “votes” (links) you receive the greater the PR. This is why you see high PRs for and MSN. So if there is no linkage to a page then no PR can be given to it (a good reason to make sure your site structure is solid).
There are many different sites that show you how to manipulate the PR of your sites and is a big reason why you will find people requesting link exchanges or being eager to buy text ads on your site. You can also check the PR of a site using Google’s own (or Googlebar if you use Mozilla/Firefox) or you can look at Digital Point’s Keyword Tracker.
With that said
So the only real advice I can give you to achieve great rankings in Google is to offer something worthwhile for people to link to on their sites. Google provides great results because it listens to the web community. If they don’t believe in what you are saying or selling them then why should Google? Once again this shows us why content is king.
There are many ways to get your pages up quickly on Google in high places (as I am sure one of the ads below will proclaim to do), but if you live like this you will always be playing a cat and mouse game. Focus on building a quality site and the rest will take care of itself.
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POSTED IN: SEO
1 opinion for How Google Works
Thomas
Feb 6, 2005 at 1:27 pm
There is some valueable information in this article. Thanks Paul and keep up the work.
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