Google Ranking Variables

Yesterday the Provo Labs Academy lecture was about Google Ranking Variables. This was a follow up to a recent lecture by Paul Allen about improving natural search rankings. In yesterday's class the top 15 or so Google Ranking Variables were discussed. There are about 100 or more, but we talked about the most influential.

At the end of class Paul ranked the variable. The list is below:

1. Page Rank of incoming links. (Meaning links to your page(s) come from pages with high rank themselves).
2. Anchor text of incoming links. (What are the descriptions of the links that come to your pages)
3. Quantity of links that come to your site.
4. Links from your site to other high ranking sites with relevant anchor text
5. Relevant Text in Title Tag of your page
6. Relevant text in Heading Tags H1, H2, etc.
7. Keyword density above the fold, meaning closer to the top of the page than the bottom. (This used to be the primary factor in the days before Google)
8. Internal site links, PR for your own site, anchor text, etc.
9. Your domain name (Is it relevant to the search terms)
10. Full URL names (Is the subfolder name relevant to the search terms)
11. File names (Are images, .PDF, .HTML pages named with relevant terms?)

The other variables that impact natural ranking but were not ranked in the top 10 are:

• Relevant Content on your page
• Click Through rates to your page
• Web presence
• Fresh content (this also drives click through rates, and page ranking)
• XML site map presented to Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.

One of the more enthusiastic discussions was about whether the folks at Google 'cook the rankings.' Paul was adamant that they don't and that everything is formula based. I gave the example of searching for 'analytics' on Google and surprisingly enough 'Google Analytics' comes up first. Paul pointed out that that ranking comes because of the formula. Since 'Google Analytics' is free, it gets more hits that other paid analytic sites.

I tested this on both MSN and Yahoo and sure enough 'Google Analytics' is their top result also.

Paul said that everything Google does is formula based so it can scale. It would take too many employees to monitor and tweak the results.

I guess that there were quite a few 'conspiracy theorists' that still believe that the search engines are 'cooking the results.' We have seen in the past how Microsoft would 'enhance' their operating systems (OS) so that their competitors struggled with desktop applications. Many people still consider this part of the game to give yourself an advantage.

We read part of the original student thesis by the founders of Google. All of this stuff was well thought out long before it was implemented by the billionaires at Google. Their original idea was to rank citations from research, scholastic, and education materials. It turns out that the same algorithms apply to the web as well.

I learned that Google actually used to be the search engine for Yahoo. Amazing.

Paul recommended anything written by Matt Cutts (MattCutts.com) and John Battelle (Battellemedia.com). These guys are the gurus and know what goes on 'under the hood.'