SEO and Page Rank

As the de facto front page of the Internet, Google has tremendous power.

Research suggest that 97% of users will never look beyond the top 30 results for their search. Google keeps the exact formula they use to rank results is a secret, and it’s constantly being modified. But when they answer over 3 billion queries a day, the difference between a high and low Google ranking in the results can be the difference between an IPO and chapter 11.

Consequently there is a constant battle between spammers (and site owners) who desperately crave the traffic of a high ranking, and Google who want their results to remain as relevant and useful as possible. And because Google is constantly modifying their formula, what worked brilliantly last month to boost your rank, might get you removed completely from the results now. And for as long as googles algorithm remains a secret, Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), isn’t a science, but something halfway between an art and superstition.

While we don’t know exactly how page rank is calculated, over the years, we’ve managed to deduce a few of the variables involved in the equation. Lets look at a couple of them, and how they’ve changed recently, and how you can use them.

• Google likes lots of inward links. One of the engine’s primary measure of a sites reputability is the number of other sites that link to it. To raise their rankings, in the past, spammers created vast networks of hundreds of thousands pages, all consisting of nothing but advertisements, and all linked to each-other. Google compensated for this effect by ignoring sites (and links from sites) where it could not see any content.
• Google likes quality inward links. Google considers links from other high ranked sites more important than links from less popular sites. Until reflectively recently spammers could piggy-back on the popularity of popular blogs, but posting comments that linked to their own sites. As a consequence Google worked to develop the rel=”nofollow” tag, which (when attached automatically to replies in the comments section of a blog) told search engines to ignore the links in a section.
• Google reads the whole page. A few years ago, search engines didn’t look too closely at the content of a page. They would examine the keywords in the meta tag of the page, and use that as an indicator of the content. As a result, websites would stuff their meta tag with hundreds of keywords, hoping to appear relevant on an equally large number of searches. Today Google reads the page much like a human visitor, giving the most notice to headlines, the page title, and bold text. It looks for words and phrases that are repeated through the page and uses that as an indicator of what the page is really about. The current wisdom holds that the page title should reflect your target keywords (which should appear again, repeatedly, in the page. Keywords that only appear in the title, and not in the page are ignored).

But no matter how sophisticated google makes their formula, at it’s core it’s still just a ‘dumb’ algorithm. And because of how valuable appearing high in the results is, it’s often very tempting to try take advantage of that fact. There are two schools of SEO. White Hat; which involves making the page clearer, better described, more accessible, adding more links (and generally making your page more useful for all readers, both human and search engines); and Black Hat, which involves finding and taking advantage of flaws in the algorithm to artificially inflate your ranking, without providing any additional utility for your visitors. Techniques such as doorway pages (which presents google with a keyword packed front page, and human visitors with your regular content) falls under this second category. Google’s ‘Webmaster Help Center’ warns readers of the dangers of such subterfuge: blacklisting and complete removal from the index.

Google’s moral code on SEO is simple: “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users“. And really, as moral codes go, that almost sounds like a precept to live by.