Google search algorithm -

What Google looks for in order to rank a site well - Providing all the basics are in place and your content is unique, here are some of the factors you may want to keep in mind about Google's ranking algorithm. Remember, Google powers the results on secondary engines such as AOL, along with search results on portal pages such as major networks like Sky in the UK or CNN in the US

1) Favor the links on "Authority" sites (sites that have fared well in the past, sites that many highly established sites link to). A link from them is worth way more than a link from an unknown.

2) Bases a large portion of its algorithm on how well optimised the site overall is, and not just a particular page (though the latter may help determine which page it wants to show).

3) Main measurement factors include:

- Domain's active age (how long a site has had active content)

- Content depth & site size (how much unique content it can index)

- Back links (how many sites link to it, not just quantity of, but quality)

- Hosting Location (a site hosted in the UK will have more advantage when searched from UK IP's). However this disregards domain suffix, for instance, a .co.uk site hosted in Ireland will still be omitted from "UK only" results.

- Title tags and text content (with titles almost always used as the link text in results)

4) Overview: Currently, the largest Search Engine Index as they have crawled the most documents, and have the largest market share (over 90% in some countries!). However, many people often misconceive how big the index is, by saying billions of websites, when it is infact pages instead (and some sites can pad the index with millions of pages).

5) Other notes:

- "Page Rank" is the patented determination of how strong a site is, based on the sites age and how many relevant inbound links it has.

- The Google spider can detect most formats, but still has trouble with Flash and JavaScript content

- Google has introduced personalised search. Those who sign in to any Google service such as Gmail and then search will be automatically served results based on their past searching history. It is often debated what they do with this info and whether it influences the overall Google algorithm.

- Google has recently changed its SERP's to include video content, maps, images and book results all to appear in the same set of search results. This is known as Universal Search

- Additional tools have been developed that can help Google index previously un-indexable content, such as XML feeds (more details on how to build XML feeds comign soon on this site).

- Only shows users a portion of links that a site receives (e.g.: by using the "link command" - users only get a portion of the sites that Google acknowledges) However there are ways around this, such as using Google Webmasters, or entering a variation of the link command. For instance: instead of link:www.nameofyoursite.com - try link:|www.nameofyoursite.com

- While they frown upon link buying, the ability to weed all those sites out has been hit and miss the past year or so, with major brand sites starting to inflate their already strongly linked sites as a result.

A general overview of Webmaster guidelines for Google is available at
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

and for a deeper assessment of Google algorithms, check out

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

and

an editorial panel at http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Also, keep an eye on our SEO tips page and view our overviews of Yahoo's Algorithm / the recently updated MSN Live algo / or the no longer Jeeved, Ask

Tag this page and use it for resource. share with your friends on....
 del.icio.us  Digg    Newsvine    Reddit    MyYahoo!    Facebook

or Sphinn it for the internet marketing community