Amit Singhal: Google's Ranking Algorithm

The New York Times has recently published an article about Amit Singhal. Amit Singhal is in charge of Google's ranking algorithm. The interview reveals some interesting facts about Google's ranking algorithm.

Google knows that its algorithm is not perfect

"Tweaking and quality control involve a balancing act. 'You make a change, and it affects some queries positively and others negatively,” [...] 'You can’t only launch things that are 100 percent positive.'"

"[...] Any of Google’s 10,000 employees can use its 'Buganizer' system to report a search problem, and about 100 times a day they do."

Why Google changes its algorithm

The article lists a concrete example why Google could change its algorithm:

"Recently, a search for 'French Revolution' returned too many sites about the recent French presidential election campaign — in which candidates opined on various policy revolutions — rather than the ouster of King Louis XVI.

A search-engine tweak gave more weight to pages with phrases like 'French Revolution' rather than pages that simply had both words."

If you want to get high rankings on Google, it's important to know whether you should use your keywords as a phrase or as separate words on your web pages.

This can be different for different keywords. Fortunately, there is a way to find out how you should use your keywords on your web pages (see below).

PageRank is just one of many factors

While PageRank was very important when Google was new, Google now uses many more factors to determine the rankings of web pages:

"PageRank is but one signal. Some signals are on Web pages — like words, links, images and so on. Some are drawn from the history of how pages have changed over time. Some signals are data patterns uncovered in the trillions of searches that Google has handled over the years."

There are many factors that influence the ranking of a web page on Google. If you want to get high Google rankings for your website, then you have to work on all of these factors.

How can you optimize your web pages for Google's algorithm?

Which factors are important for Google? Does your website have these factors?

You don't have access to Google's internal tools. How can you find out whether it is better to have the words "French revolution" as a phrase on your web pages or if you should use both words separately (see example above)? Which other factors are important for high Google rankings?

That's why TOTUS recommneds a top 10 optimizer tool. WebCEO Top 10 Optimizer demystifies Google's ranking algorithm by analyzing the top ranked pages. WebCEO tells you in plain English where to put the keywords on your web pages and which factors lead to top 10 Google rankings.

The information is specifically for your website, your keywords and for Google (you can also select other major search engines). If you haven't used the top 10 optimizer with your web pages yet, give it a try.

Google's March 1st 07 Ranking Algorithm Changes

In a recent thread on WebmasterWorld, people observed that there is a change in Google's ranking algorithm. It looks as if more pages are added to Google's supplemental results and that Google might re-rank the results based on new quality criteria.

What's new in Google's ranking algorithm?

It seems that Google internally returns a first set of results that is then re-ranked according to multipliers determined in testing just this set of results.

If your web site is not included in the first set of results then the re-ranking step cannot help you because no new results are added.

If your website is included in the first set of results then the re-ranking can either help you or hurt your rankings. If your web site fails one of the re-ranking tests, then your rankings scores (relevance score, trust score, website age score, etc.) might be lowered and your rankings will drop.

Such a new ranking method would explain the yo-yo effect that can be observed for some URLs: a web page goes from search result page one to the end of the results and comes back again. The same web site is always part of the first result set but re-ranked differently.

Are more pages going supplemental?

Google might use the new system to quickly get the first set of results (probably cached sets of results). To make the primary index less unwieldy, more pages might be moved to the supplemental results.

The supplemental index would only be accessed if the total number of sites in the primary index fell below a threshold.

What can you do to benefit from the new algorithm?

If you want to get high rankings with Google's new algorithm then you must create a trustworthy web site with good content:

• Get good inbound links from trusted websites to raise the TrustRank value of your own web site.
• Get links from websites that have many backlinks (these pages usually have a high TrustRank).
• Improve the co-citation of your website by getting link from web pages that link to other sites that are related to yours.
• Try to get links from pages that link to other trusted pages next to the link to your site.
• Optimize the content of your web pages to show Google that your web pages are relevant to a special topic.
  

High Google rankings are still the result of two important factors: optimized web page content and the right inbound links.

The problem is to find out exactly how the web page content should be optimized and exactly how the inbound links now should look like. This is by far the best tool on the market to do just that: SEO Elite