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."

Comments

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?

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.

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 (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.

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

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. 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.