Google’s Central Conflict

Here’s the problem Google has: you’ve got a website about sauerkraut, and someone just typed ‘how to make sauerkraut’ into the Google search field and pressed the return button. There are 770,000 articles in their index that match this string. How do they decide which article to serve first in the list? Where does your site rank?

In very simple terms, there are a couple of criteria Google uses to determine PageRank:

1. How many other sites think your site is a trustworthy authority on the keywords entered?
2. How many people have already searched for ‘how to make sauerkraut’ and then clicked on your link?

There are hundreds or perhaps thousands of criteria Google uses or we think Google uses. Here’s a more comprehensive list of Google ranking factors.

Google is Mysterious

Google has to play its cards close to its chest. If it didn’t, far more sites would game the system than currently do. All you’d see when you searched for ‘sauerkraut’ is the ‘Shamwow Sauerkraut Spinner’ (this product doesn’t exist, I just wish it did).

Google won’t tell us directly how to get high rankings. Many times we have to guess from the way sites are ranked, and simple trial and error. It’s a constantly changing game. Web developers can and do gang up on Google to figure out why they do what they do, trading secrets and tips on blogs everywhere. On the other hand, Google can always change its algorithms.

A Few Clues

Google’s Matt Cutts says, “We prefer to focus on things like ‘trust’, ‘authority’, ‘reputation’, PageRank, high quality… The Google philosophy has always been the same: If somebody comes to Google and types ‘x’, we want to return high-quality information about ‘x’.” They repeat this a lot, and many people say, “But that doesn’t tell me how to get to the top of the rankings!”. It doesn’t, but it shows us how we can help Google’s business while they help ours: create trustworthy content that people find useful.

Corollary

Because Google has an enormous team of well-paid engineers focused on outwitting web masters everywhere, beware of anyone who says they know how to get your page to the top of Google’s rankings. As a business owner or marketing director, you can do much of the work yourself by finding partners to link to your site and by writing content that everyone wants to have.

Google wants to know if your site’s content is trustworthy and valuable to their users. It uses the PageRank scoring system to describe your site’s popularity. One large factor of your site’s score is the quality and trustworthiness of the sites that link to yours. Such a link is called a “backlink” in search engine optimization (SEO) terms.

When a site with better popularity than yours links to you, it bumps up your ranking. Government (.gov) and educational (.edu) sites are more trusted by Google, and they are very valuable backlinks to have.

Beware of Toxic Backlinks

A site that is less popular can hurt you, if Google has taken disciplinary action against the site. A toxic site is one that has a history of spreading viruses, spamming people, or using ‘black hat’ SEO techniques to try to boost their popularity artificially on Google. Such a backlink could lower your PageRank.

For this reason, Quoin Design advises its clients to avoid signing up for “link farms” where people trade links in the hope that more links will equal better page rank. It just doesn’t. Your time is better spent writing rich content which is what Google wants more than anything else.

Before you trade links, make sure that the other site’s PageRank is higher than yours. If it isn’t, you might still want to do the deal for other business reasons, but make sure they’re a good internet citizen first. It’s the quality of the backlinks that counts, not the quantity.