Google itself offers up vast amounts of information on how it works, what it looks for and what it dislikes. While they do not give away all their secrets, they have a patent on how they provide searches, they do lead you in the right directions.
According to Google they consider themselves as “an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned (“served”) to you.”
But how do they do this? Google says that this is accomplished with three things. Crawling, Indexing and Serving.
Crawling is what their spider does. It “is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.“ They use large banks of computers around the world to constantly monitor the web. If the stats from some of the sites I monitor are any indication, google bots are very active little creatures. I have sites that google visits on average of 40-50 times per day with peaks of 300 visits per day.
As the google bot goes from one site to another it indexes changes, dead links, and new links, the links it follows around and sees where it takes them. It looks at information submitted for google to search by webmasters, like myself, such as sitemaps and other files placed in websites to direct its bot around to better index the site.
Google says that they do not use the influence of it’s ad generating side of the business to affect search results. There is no evidence of that this is true or not so we kind of have to take them for their word for it. However search results on Google if you haven’t noticed are surrounded by ads so you can pay to get on the first page, if you have enough money. I will talk about paying for advertising on the net in another article.
Next is the indexing of the pages. Google bots read the pages and catalogs the words it reads on pages and where they are located at in the page. Quoting from Google 101 “In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.”
Next is serving up the information when someone does a search. According to Google they look at what the “querry” is and through the use of over 200 things they determine what it is that they are looking for and offer up search results. One of the things they do note right away is they look at links coming into your site. “PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages.” adding “each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank“. Thus the importance of links from other sites.
Sparky