Google – Leader, Innovator & Relevant

Google has become the “Big Boy” on the block for internet search which can be clearly seen by their approximate 57% of the US search share according to SearchEngineWatch.com.  Their advanced search algorithm and crawling technology have made them the leader that they are today.  Their users are treated to highly relevant searches provided at lightning fast speeds.

• Crawling & Indexing
  As Google crawls the internet by following the links on billions of web pages they collect and detect many things.  At the most basic level they discover new and updated web page content to add to their index.  Googlebot, their crawling spider, is also trained to detect duplicate content, hidden content, paid links and other spamming techniques employed by many to try to trick Google into giving them high rankings.  These techniques are not a part of search engine optimization and will in many cases hurt a sites’ performance on the engines.

Google has created a group of Webmaster Tools to help site owners provide Googlebot with detailed information about their sites.  One of the these tools is a Google Sitemap which maps out all the pages of your website, indicates the importance level of each page, tells the frequency at which each page is updated and has the date of the most recent update to each page.  This sitemap then allows Googlebot to index all of your pages, no matter how big your site is.  It also tells Googlebot how frequently it will be able to find new and updated content on your site leading Googlebot to return on a regular basis.

• Ranking Philosophy
  Google tells us that they use over 200 factors to help in determining how they rank web pages in their results.  By using such an in-depth algorithm one thing we learn about Google is that they want to provide the best information possible for all search queries and they go to great lengths to make sure the results are relevant, trust worthy and timely.

We have found that site owners who take care to create good, quality, original content will have a competitive advantage on Google even before they employ solid search engine optimization techniques for their website.  As a matter of fact, creating that kind of content is the foundation of search engine optimization and is worth the effort and resources to build it.

Some aspects of Google’s ranking philosophy is revealed through observation of their top results.  One observation that we have found to be true is that Google gives preference to older domains.  We believe that Google does this because of a trust and reliability factor that Google looks for in providing relevant results.  Sites that have been around longer, Google reasons, are showing that time has proven them to be more stable and enduring and therefore more worthy of higher rankings.

Google’s PageRank system is also considered in the ranking of websites.  PageRank is a score given to each web page that primarily measures incoming links to a site.  This scoring is continually being improved as Google learns new ways to evaluate these links.  Links can be considered like popularity votes for website but not all links are equal in their system.  Some of the things Google considers in a link are the relevance of the link to the receiving site, the PageRank of the giving page, the text used in the link, the text around the link, the age of the link, does the link get used and is the link a paid link.

• Inside Google
  Google is working hard to make it easy for website owners to follow their search philosophy. They have provided many channels of communication and tools that provide valuable information to website owners and you can find a few of them listed below.

- Webmaster Central
- Keyword Tool
- Webmaster Guidelines