How Google Ranks Web Pages
To optimize effectively, you must have a thorough understanding of how web pages are ranked, especially by Google. While Google isn't the only search engine, over 65% of all searches are still done on Google.1
While the details of Google's algorithms are a closely guarded secret, there are things we know about how Google ranks web pages based on public statements, published papers and experience with the algorithm. While the algorithm is constantly changing, there are some general principles that have remained constant over the years.
How Google Works
First, to even consider ranking your web page, Google must find it. Google discovers web pages through a process called indexing. It sends out many copies of its automated website crawler known as "Googlebot" to crawl the Web. Each Googlebot program then reports back to a central index with what it finds – both content information and linking information. Links are particularly important as these are the paths that the Googlebot follows to find additional pages.
The first principle is that Google must find your web pages to even consider ranking them. This web page discovery happens through a process called indexing. Google sends out many copies of its automated website crawler known as "googlebot" to crawl the web. Each googlebot program then reports back to a central index with what it finds – both content information and linking information. Links are particularly important as these are the paths that the googlebot follows to find additional pages.
Once your web pages are found, Google ranks them based on two factors: Relevancy and Importance. Relevancy refers to how closely the content of your web page matches the search term the user entered. To determine this, Google looks at many elements of your web page, such as title tag, heading tags, body text, link text, URL text, and alt attribute of images (text descriptions). The link text of links on the pages that link to your page is also a relevancy signal. Although the meta description tag is used by Google for other purposes, it is not a factor for Relevancy (see related blog post "How to use meta description tags").
Google measures the Importance of a web page using its PageRank algorithm. Google assigns a PageRank value to every page it crawls using a logarithmic scale from 0 to 10, where 10 is the most important. Google determines the PageRank of a particular web page by looking at all pages that link to that page (called its link popularity). The more popular a web page, i.e. the more links it has attracted, the more important it is according to Google.
Each link to your web page from an external website (or from your own website) carries with it some contributed PageRank or "link juice". Google adds up all the link juice for a particular page and then computes its PageRank. The amount of link juice contributed by any single link is roughly the PageRank of that link's page divided by the number of outbound links on that page. Since some links carry more link juice than others, it matters where your links come from. Ideally you would like to have links to your web page from sites with web pages that have high PageRank. It would be better still if those high PageRank web pages are related topically to your web page, because this reinforces the keyword focus of your page. Web sites such as these are "authority" sites for your keyword space and a link from them is very valuable.
So how does Google work? In sum, Google indexes your website through the Googlebot program, capturing your relevancy signals and link structure in its index. Then, in response to a search term being entered by a user, it combs through its index to identify all the pages that are relevant to that particular search term. Finally, Google takes the most relevant pages of these and sorts them by a complex combination of Relevancy and PageRank (Importance) to get the rank-ordered list of web pages to display on its results page.
To find out more about an SEO process you can follow, go to our article "How to get found in Google". To find out more about choosing an SEO company to help you through the process, go to "How to choose an SEO company."
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1 comScore Media Metrix, September 2010
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