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Good Google - Writing for the most powerful robot in the world |
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Good Google - Writing for the most powerful robot in the world
by Jim Hedger, Contributing Writer - December 1st 2004
Google "...is big. Really Big. You just won't believe how vastly
hugely mind-bogglingly big it is." (excerpt from The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy)
Google is the most powerful information resource humans have ever
constructed. The power of any major search tool boggles the mind but
considering the vastness of Google's complex simplicity can truly
hurt one's brain. With over 8-billion references in its rapidly
growing, organically generated index, Google sets the standards
other search engines follow. Benefiting from a three year reign as
the undisputed leader of search, Google has had a very good year and
looks poised to make 2005 an even better year.
In 2004, Google introduced more new and improved applications for
its users than any other tech company, posted one of the most
successful IPO's in business history in a most unorthodox
Dutch-Auction format, and met or exceeded any challenges its rivals
threw at.
Google is no longer just a search engine, it is an advertising
machine. Drawing about 90% of its revenues from paid advertising and
contextual ad-delivery, Google has had two major focuses this
quarter. The first is increasing the number of places
paid-advertising might show up. The second is to develop new
products and features that will retain current user loyalty and win
new users from the other search firms. Both initiatives rely heavily
on Google's reputation for delivering fast, free and relevant search
results. Google has the world's largest database of indexed websites
and it acquires site information through its spider GoogleBot.
GoogleBot is probably the most well-known spider working the web
today. It is also likely among the most analyzed applications ever
written. On one level, GoogleBot is quite simple and can be depended
on to act in a very specific manner. GoogleBot lives to follow
links. GoogleBot will often chase down a link-path until it can no
longer work its way deeper into a site. It will also work its way
through any site linked to from any other site. Google finds the
majority of new sites in its index by following links from
established sites. If a link exists, Google will (A) find it, (B)
follow it, (C ), record every bit of information it can possibly
record, and (D) weigh that information against a fairly rigid
algorithm to determine the perceived topic or theme of a site for
future reference. If a site in Google's index is modified or
changes, Google will re-spider the site as quickly as it possibly
can.
GoogleBot's mission is to create a snap-shot of the World Wide Web
and store it across Google's network of data centers around the
world. When you reference information from Google, the results you
see reflect Google's most recent snap-shot of the web. Parts of that
snap-shot might be hours or even weeks old but overall the index is
updating itself every minute of every day, 24/7. The fastest way to
see exactly what Google views as the most recent version of your
site is to click on the “Cached” link generally below the main
link-reference Google displays for your site.
How GoogleBot behaves as it acquires sites is one thing. What Google
does with the information its bot gathers is another thing. Google's
method of ranking websites is extremely (and increasingly) complex.
To understand how Google works today, a brief (and over simplified)
explanation of the principle of PageRank is in order.
Google was originally developed as a means of finding information in
research documents at Stanford University where its inventors Larry
Page and Sergey Brin met as grad students. PageRank was developed as
the basic sorting algorithm for their search tool (then known as
Backrub) and was based on a very simple concept, trust.
Page and Brin understood that documents on the Internet could be
linked together. They speculated that if someone took the time to
code a link (by hand in those days) to another document there was
likely a relevance between the two documents. Why else would one
researcher link to another researcher's work? Simply put, the more
incoming links a particular document has, the better it would rank
when sorted by PageRank. Given the environment in which it was
developed, Google's genesis proved to be the perfect tool for
intelligent users. Tranfering that simplicity from a dorm room at
Stanford to practically every living room and office space on Earth
has been a great challenge for Google's engineers. While it is still
somewhat based on the original, “democratic” nature of PageRank,
Google's sorting algorithm has become infinitely more complicated.
Google continues to weigh the number of links directed towards a
site as positive indicators that there is relevant information to be
found there. Since links are the veins and arteries of the web,
links continue to be the most important factor influencing Google's
perception of the relevance of a website. As the Google index has
grown so rapidly over the past six years, and search engine
marketers have learned how to use Google's behaviours to influence
rankings, Google weighs several other factors when considering the
relevance of a site but the core of the algorithm remains rooted in
PageRank.
Not all Links are Created Equal
Back in the good old days, seven or eight years ago at Stanford, one
link could represent one positive vote. As marketers learned to
manipulate links, Google learned to apply different standards and
measures when looking at those links and the content of sites in its
index. Today, Google considers different links in different ways. As
a matter of interest, our recent studies show that Google displays
less back-links for sites than any other search engine, leading us
to conclude that Google has become much stricter about how it views
and values incoming links.
Google looks at a number of factors when determining the value of a
link. Where the link originates from is as important as where the
link is directed in Google's eyes. Google, like its rivals, is
trying to find relationships between documents aside from obvious
keywords. Google has the ability to fundamentally understand
documents in its index and determine the topic, theme or context of
those documents. This is an important measure as Google is becoming
increasingly strict about link-relevance. To receive a highly
positive response from Google, the pages or sites linked together
must somehow relate to each other in topic as well as by sharing
similar keywords. An excellent example would be in regional tourism.
A local tourism bureau will almost certainly have a website. That
site will link to the sites of member-clients in its region. Each of
those sites represent businesses dependent on regional tourism, thus
establishing relevance between the sites. The tourism bureau becomes
the “hub” from which Google follows links to other, topically
related websites. In this way, the Hub site becomes a highly
positive link-reference in Google's eyes.
The very best links, in Google's eyes, come from “authority sites”.
An authority site is one that is very well established and respected
such as mainstream news sites (CNN, TIME, NYTimes, etc...) other
search directories, industrial leaders (Macromedia, HP, Pitney
Bowes, Nike, etc...), and other highly credible sources such as the
regional tourism bureau mentioned above. While a website doesn't
necessarily have to represent a large corporation to be considered
an authority site, the sheer number of pages and references,
combined with high visitor numbers generally associated with large
corporate sites helps. Some personal Blogs, smaller companies and
alternative news sources/blogs have also enjoyed “authority” status.
This status is, in some ways, flexible and situational. A link from
the tourism bureau mentioned above will not tend to help a business
outside of its region unless a tangible relevancy factor is somehow
introduced.
In practical terms, the “authority” status of a website is
irrelevant for SEOs as the vast majority of sites in Google's index
are just regular, run of the mill websites run by regular, run of
the mill folks like us. Small businesses, researchers, governments,
NGOs, musicians, artists, families, hobbyists and others write
websites to offer the world access to their information. 99.999999%
of these sites contain links of some sort or another and the vast
majority of those links lead to topically relevant documents. While
not “authority” sites, Google still considers these links extremely
important when sorting and ranking sites. Again, the stress is on
topical relevancy as Google places enormous value in good, solid
links.
Google does not live on links alone
Much as been written in this article and thousands of others about
Google and links. If links were the only factor Google looks at, the
SEO business would not exist and Google's index would be as
off-kilter as a Batman set. As stated in previous paragraphs, Google
has the ability to read sites and understand what it is reading.
Google is able to reference a world of information when figuring out
the context of text used in Titles, Meta Tags, Body Text and Anchor
Links. Since we know that Google is actually reading and
comprehending content, we need to place specific content in places
we know GoogleBot likes to look for it. Writing and placing this
information is where SEO becomes an artful science that stems from
simple common sense. Think about what Google knows about your
website before it even visits.
It finds your site by following links. Therefore it "assumes" your
site is topically relevant to the site it acquired the link to your
site from. Google knows the address of the site, the URL. It also
knows what anchor text the original linking site used when phrasing
the link to your website. Keyword enrichment of both elements is
beneficial with Google. In other words, if you can, use a target
keyword phrase in the URL of your site, and request that others
linking to your site use your target keyword phrases as the anchor
text of links directed to your site.
Once Google hits your site, it learns a lot more very quickly. It
sees the title, tags, text and links, and records these elements as
it moves through the site. These are the basic elements SEOs examine
and modify when working on your site.
The first thing GoogleBot sees is the title of the site. Keyword
enriched titles are very useful but webmasters are cautioned to be
very conservative in the number of keywords or phrases they place in
the title of a page. We generally use two or three keyword phrases
when writing titles. Page titles should be page specific with
keywords focused on the topic of the page. The second (or third)
keyword set in the title is used to provide an overall context to
the site. For example, <title="Blue Widgets :: Preformed Blocks and
Spacers :: Construction Materials"> Overloading the title with
keywords is useless and may be considered spam in extreme cases.
Next, Google looks at the meta tags. Unless you wish to exclude
Google from sections of your site, there are only two really
important meta tags, the description and the keywords tags. Of these
two, the description is the most important. Google uses the
description tag as a topical reference and may draw from the
description tag when generating the two to three sentence site
description shown under links in the SERPs. As with titles, each
page should have a page specific description tag that outlines the
topic of that page and the theme of the overall site. The keywords
tag is of much lesser importance but is still considered to carry
minor weight. Mentioning keywords that might be associated with your
website, including common misspellings doesn't hurt. Packing the
keywords tag with dozens of mentions of the same word, or using
keywords that do not relate to your website might. We still use the
keyword tag on client sites and still use page-specific keyword
tags.
After the meta tags, Google looks at page content or body text.
Again, relevance is extremely important. The Internet is a very big
place and Google's index is pretty big itself. Finding documents in
an 8-billion page universe requires precision. Webmasters can help
themselves by simply addressing one topic or issue per page. Google
is extremely intelligent and intuitive, but even the smartest robots
get confused. Keeping it simple for GoogeBot makes good ranking much
simpler to achieve for your site. As Google reads information from
left to right in columns, like we read a newspaper, placing your
keyword phrases early in the body text of pages in your site is very
beneficial. Well written sentences that are topically focused are
the best spider food for Google as it has become wary of words that
"float" on a page without supporting words to provide context.
Lastly, GoogleBot comes back to links. GoogleBot moves through your
website following links you place there. It reads the text that
phrases the links to determine what it might find when it gets to
the next page. For example, the second page in most websites is the
"About Us" page. Billions of websites use "About Us" as the anchor
text linking the index page to the about us page. A better link
would read About "Blue Widgets Inc." as the keyword phrase Blue
Widgets is used as the anchor text from one page to the next.
Keyword enrichment of anchor text also effects Google's perception
of external links . Going back to our tourism bureau example, a link
to a local bed and breakfast might read "Humboldt House" Bed and
Breakfast or it might read Humboldt House "Victoria – Bed and
Breakfast". The anchor text used in the second example would be far
more beneficial than the first.
Remember, links provide the pathway for GoogleBot and other spiders.
A final element that should be included on all pages is a text-based
sitemap that links to all pages in the site and is linked to from
the Home or INDEX page.
In a nutshell, that's how GoogleBot examines a site. Here is a quick
rundown of which elements GoogleBot is looking for:
Relevant Incoming Links
Good URLs that are not too spammy
Easy to follow link paths including a sitemap
Keyword enriched titles
Well written Description Meta Tag
Well written Keywords Meta Tag (less important than Description)
Topically focused Body Text
Keyword Enriched Anchor Text
NO SPAM
Relevance, relevance, relevance
Next week, we'll look at MSNBot.
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