An Introduction to Google

Google is “the” Internet search engine. Over 150 million searches are conducted daily. Between Google, Yahoo and Bing, these three account for about 90% of all searches made on the web.
As stated in the first paragraph, over 160 million searches are conducted every day with Google. Even if your business or product is currently listed on Google, do you think that a boost in ranking to the 1st or 2nd page would increase the number of
potential customers coming to your web site?

How Does Google Calculate Page Relevance?

Although I don’t know how the Google algorithm works exactly, no-one does, it’s a closely guarded secret, I do know that Google relies on 118 different calculations to workout the relevancy of any particular page for a search, the big one is link popularity…

Link Popularity
If you have downloaded the Google toolbar, then you will have seen the green bar that Google uses to rank every site you visit. This ranking is Google’s PageRank, and is indicated on a scale of 1 to 10. Generally, sites with a PageRank of 7-10 are considered excellent in terms of quality and popularity.
But how is this rank calculated? Quite simply actually. Google’s main criteria for the calculation of relevancy for a page is based on the number of web sites that link back to that particular site.
However, having 100,000 web sites linking back to your site will not necessarily mean that you will attain a PageRank of 10. Each site that links back to you must in itself contain quality content and have a high (7-10) PageRank for it to impact positively on the PageRank of your web site. Yes, sites with a poor PageRank can bring your sites PageRank down.

If Google’s PageRank technology sounds confusing, just try and remember that Google’s PageRank is the #1 criterion for calculating the relevancy of any web page in relation to the
specified search term.

Now, there are supposedly over 118 factors involved in exactly how Google calculates your Search Engine Rank Position (SERP), as mentioned above, Google places more emphasis on PageRank than other engines. We’ll also be looking at some of the other main factors in a later chapter.