Google Search Engine Ranking

History:

Google arrived quite late to the party. The big boys already there included AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Lycos, AOL Netfind, and the late, great InfoSeek. Founded by two postgraduate students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google steadfastly remained a clean and fresh search site, While all the other guys were going the portal route.

Google is a play on the word googol, which is the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's mission is to organize the vast amount of information available on the web.

Who Is In Bed With Whom?

Google provides secondary results for Yahoo, which actually helped to push them past all the other players as the search engine which sends the most traffic.

Google gets its directory directly from ODP (the Open Directory Project). They have been partnered up for a couple of years now, and it appears that partnership will continue. The ODP is a known gateway into Google.

How It Works:

Google's PageRank, known as PR, which assigns scores to the quality and number of inbound links to a page, renders traditional keyword stuffing useless. PageRank can be thought of as a polling facility: it counts links to your site as votes for that site. However, it counts more than just the number of "votes" your site gets; it evaluates the "voting" site and gives more weight to the votes from what it considers important sites.

Hence, if you have one link from a PR10 site, it counts more than several links from PR1 sites.

Google also uses a text-matching technology which checks to see if the links are from sites relevant to your own. For example, if your site sells software, 1 link from Microsoft count more than several links from real estate sites.

The thinking here seems to be that if your site is itself important or relevant, important and relevant sites will refer to it.

Google does not care about meta tags; it cares about content, so your text is the most important thing on your pages.

Google finds sites by crawling the web. Googlebot may find a site via a link on another site, or you may submit the URL directly to Google. Google crawls submissions during the regular crawl, so your site could appear in the next reindex.

Google updates approximately once a month. For a history of Google's updates from July, 2000, until present, see Brett Tabke's Webmaster World post.

Spam Policy:

Trying to manipulate your ranking in Google will quite likely backfire on you. As many people have found out, link schemes and FFAs are regularly rooted out and sites penalized for them.

Tips and Tricks:

Google seems to favor sites which are listed in ODP. Although the article is old, the basics remain pretty much the same in this article about how to submit to ODP.

Get listed on ODP, Yahoo, About.com, and LookSmart.

If eligible, get listed in Google's other facilites, which include Google Glossary, Google News, or their catalog search, Froogle. Other Googles are listed here.

Keep your navigation simple. Keep in mind that GoogleBot needs to get to all your pages, and make that task easy for it.

The more pages, the more content; the more content, the more Google loves it.

Keep your pages tight and on-topic. This will make keywording easier. If your site is about the Ford Mustang, don't make one large page covering everything. I would make one page about the design of the car, one for history, one for tires, one for seats…you get the idea.

Changing Or Removing An Entry:

Google will stop indexing the page of your site if you are the person responsible for the pages. This page offers the following options:

Change the URL;

Remove the site entirely;

Remove individual pages;

Remove snippets;

Remove cached pages;

Remove dead links;

Remove images from Google's image search.