Google's Site Ranking Secrets

vivin writes "Ever wonder how Google's site ranking works? Wonder no more. Google recently filed United States Patent Application 20050071741 on March 31, 2005. This patent reveals a great deal of information about Google's site ranking algorithm and makes very good reading. For example, one of the criteria that they use is the number of years that your site has been registered. If your site has been registered for less than a year, then it counts against you. A site registered for a longer period of time means that the owner is probably serious about the site, and the site is probably legitimate. Google's Site Ranking algorithms reveal how hard they are making it for spam sites to get listed (on Google). This information will also make it easier for you to make sure that you get listed well in Google."

Spammers killing Google

[Dancin_Santa]

Could someone explain how other crap search engines are getting high rankings in Google search?

Sometimes when I search for something specific, I get a bunch of useless links that have results of other "search engines" that invariably show something similar to "0 results for your search terms 'sheep+barn+slashbot+erotica'"

How do these sites get on the first page of Google results?

I thought so .. changed my site from .ro to .com

[acostin]

I always suspected this... When we've started our business, we used the domain www.interakt.ro [interakt.ro] (we're from Romania). However, because we sell software tools mostly to the USA and Western Europe, we've decided to go to www.interaktonline.com [interaktonline.com].

Instantly, our ranking went from number one (for "Dreamweaver Php" for example, we were number one there instead of Macromedia itself a long time), to page 10.
Now, we're working hard to promote our site, we have links all over the place, but still our site don't get up again to page 1 (search for "dreamweaver extensions" - we have to pay to get our site in the first position). I even thought that they do this on purpose for us to continue to pay on Google Ads :D

Probably they say it too in the patent, but the best ranking tool is to use the right "title" tag in your pages. It's invaluable how well this scores as compared to the page content.

Alexandru

If you wanna know how your site ranks in google...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.googlerankings.com/ [googlerankings.com]

Re:Spammers killing Google

[jrumney]

Yes, they're really annoying. They often have genuine looking summaries in Google's results, inticing you to click on them expecting to find useful information, but all you find is a page of links, often completely unrelated to your Google search. I wonder why Google hasn't got on top of them yet. All it would take is a second robot identifying itself as Internet Explorer slowly crawling the web looking for pages that give completely different results than the google spider.

Impossible? Spyware?

[bogado]

Some of the tatics detailed in the article require a spyware (google toolbar?). It is not possible for google to know when you came back to the search engine from your site, or another one (unless you have a link in your site to google). It also impossible for google to know if you have a bookmark.

Google does have a click-through engine attached to the results, but many people find this in adition to the single identifier cookie that googles push into you abusive already.

We all thing google is doing a good job, and it did managed to incorporate adds and an add service that is well accepted by the people. (I wonder why people still think it is a good idea to make blinking and noisy flash adds?) The point is how much we trust google? I personaly don't mind very much the click through, but do not accept the cookie and will not install a toolbar.

Why did Google do this?

[Blowfishie]

How can Google claim a patent infringement if other companies are keeping their algorithms as secret as Google did?

Their pagerank algorithm was one of the keys to their success. Keeping it secret was one of the things that made Google work and it was a good secret - nobody completely knew how it worked. So why patent it? What's the point?

Re:Spammers killing Google

[Anonymous Coward]

But mailing list archives are valid results in that case, in fact I like them because they confirm it's a (more or less) common problem and often there will be a helpful reply. And yeah, mailing list archive navigation sucks bigtime...

Re:SEOs make me barf

[Momoru]

I agree they can be evil...but one thing Google lacks is giving new sites some priority....say i come out with the best tech site ever, but I have no money to advertise with, how do i get it popular? Ok i submit it to Google. I appear on page 5000 of the results. I have to beg people to link to my site, maybe spam a couple of blogs, i dunno...the thing is without the tricks, its almost impossible to get your new site to appear in the search results. And even with them its still pretty difficult. I think maybe google should have a special section of "new to the web" or whatever to give these sites publicity. In the old days, the yahoo directory kind of put all decent sites on even ground.

Doesn't work, see explanation

[stripmarkup]

This type of spam (showing a page to the crawler and another to the user) is called cloaking. Cloakers have anticipated this sort of move and can detect a search engine's crawler by not just the user agent but also the IP address range it comes from and other heuristics. In order to beat them, search engines would have to crawl from unpredictable IP addresses and behave like regular users.

A while back I proposed a distributed approach like this in the Nutch mailing list [mail-archive.com]. The problem is that it would be hard to implement and it may not be worth the effort, since there are cheaper ways to fight spam.

Re:Speed of gaining links?

[ozbon]

I'd have thought that the "Slashdot effect" etc. wouldn't really affect a Google pagerank, as despite the site getting lots of hits, they're all from one link on /.

So it's only gained one link through /. , but loads of bandwidth etc.

Re:SEOs make me barf

[Irish_Samurai]

Snake oil salesmen? That is ridiculous, SEO's and SEM's provide a service with results that are undeniable. Thats not snake oil.

Look, SEO can be broken into two camps just like system security - Black and White. Good guys will tell you to build your pages with good content, and get meaningful links to other like minded sites. WE (I'm an SEO guy) do this to keep your site insulated from the fluctuating Google algorithm. Now, unscrupulous SEO guys will employ cloaking techniques or generate Link farms to up their PR, in turn effecting their organic ranking. This has a quick, short term effect that usually results in getting banned or penalized.

Here's a scenario for you. What if you have two competing, well built sites with great content on the same subject? How does one get the edge? SEO, that's how. You can restructure they way your code is layed out to have an affect on how the spiders "see" your site. This is NOT cloaking because the human sees the same exact page as the spider.

Whoever modded this post as insightful doesn't know what they're talking about. The truth of the matter is, when good SEO is employed - you don't even know about it. I can look at a website and in 5 seconds detirmine if it has employed SEO techniques. Your average surfer, and more importantly your average tech guy, cannot. Most high ranking sites employ SEO, not all are link farms.

Doesn't mean it really works this way

[PepeGSay]

Remember, this is a patent which requires no working model. In other words, this could be how Google *envisions* their search working as much as it indentifies any of the things it does do.

Re:About the autor

[wheany]

Without even visiting the link, you can see that www.how-to-make-money-online.info is clearly a spam site. [how-to-mak...nline.info]

My experience with FunWithHeadlines.net

[FunWithHeadlines]

I started Fun With Headlines [funwithheadlines.net] a few years back, and with no advertising on my part I was suprised how quickly Google picked me up. Right now I'm about the 5th or 6th result when you search for "fun headlines" and (obviously) the 1st when you search for "fun with headlines." At times I have been the 1st for "fun headlines," and at other times I have been around 10th.

OK, so there aren't that many sites like mine, let alone sites that update daily over a period of years and include their entire archive on the site that grows daily. On the other hand, to my knowledge from doing searches on Google, I have very few site that link to mine, and I thought that counted highly with Google. So basically without trying to game the system, let alone advertise my site (other than incidentally in comments like this), I've been treated really well by Google.

In my case, it must be the longevity issue coupled with the scarcity of sites like mine. It sure ain't the links to my site.

So now I can make my foe look like a spammer?

[davidwr]

I'm evil and want my small business competitor to drop in the rankings.

I set up a link-exchange farm and make sure he's listed prominently.

POOF he's branded a spammer.

Number of years the site has been registered

[Vadim Makarov]

For example, one of the criteria that they use is the number of years that your site has been registered. If your site has been registered for less than a year, then it counts against you.

So I get the following:

Date: 2 Jun 2005 11:42:45 -0000
From: Bettina Jensen <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: [#17922] Buying your domain: vad1.com

Dear Webmaster

I am interested in buying your domain vad1.com for $400.
I'm only interested in the domain not in your content, so
you can sell your domain and move your content to another domain.
If you are interested please respond to this e-mail.

Regards,

Bettina Jensen