Introduction to how Google works

Introduction to how Google works.

You can feel like a dog chasing its own tail trying to figure out how Google
works.
There are thousands of bloggers and journalists spreading volumes of
information that simply isn't true. If you followed all the advice about SEO
written on blogs, it's unlikely you would receive top listings in Google, and
there’s a risk you could damage your site performance and make it difficult to
rank at all.
Let me tell you a secret about bloggers…
Articles about the latest SEO updates, techniques or tips are often written by
interns, assistants or even ghostwriters. Their job is to write articles. The
majority of blog posts about SEO are rarely written by experts or
professionals with the day-to-day responsibility of growing site traffic and
achieving top rankings in search engines.
Can you learn from someone who doesn't even know how to do it
themselves?
You can't. This is why you have to take the advice spread by blog posts with
a grain of salt.
Don't get me wrong. I love bloggers. There are bloggers out there who
practice and blog about SEO, and do it well. But it has become increasingly
difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Fear not. This chapter will disperse common misconceptions about SEO,
show you how to avoid falling into Google's bad books and reveal how to
stay up-to-date with how Google ranks sites.
But first, to understand how Google works today, we must understand a little
bit about Google's history.
Old-school methods that no longer work.
In the early days of Google—over 15 years ago— Google started a smarter
search engine and a better experience for navigating the World Wide Web.
Google delivered on this promise by delivering relevant search engine results.
Internet users discovered they could simply type what they were looking for
into Google—and BINGO—users would find what they needed in the top
results, instead of having to dig through hundreds of pages. Google's user
base grew fast.
It didn't take long for smart and entrepreneurially minded webmasters to
catch on to sneaky little hacks for ranking high in Google.
Webmasters discovered by cramming many keywords into the page, they
could get their site ranking high for almost any word or phrase. It quickly
spiraled into a competition of who could jam the most keywords into the
page. The page with the most repeated keywords won, and rose swiftly to the
top of the search results.
Naturally, more and more spammers caught on and Google's promise as the
“most relevant search engine” was challenged. Webmasters and spammers
became more sophisticated and found tricky ways of repeating hundreds of
keywords on the page and completely hiding them from human eyes.
All of a sudden, the unsuspecting Internet user looking for “holidays in
Florida” would find themselves suddenly arriving at a website about Viagra
Viagra Viagra!
How could Google keep its status as the most relevant search engine if people
kept on spamming the results with gazillions of spammy pages, burying the
relevant results at the bottom?
Enter the first Google update. Google released a widespread update in
November 2003 codenamed Florida, effectively stopping spammers in their
tracks. This update leveled the playing field by rendering keyword stuffing
completely useless and restored balance to the force.
And so began the long history of Google updates—making it hard for
spammers to game the system and making ranking in Google a little more
complicated for everyone.
Google updates and how to survive them.
Fast forward 15 years and ranking in Google has become extremely
competitive and considerably more complex.
Simply put, everybody wants to be in Google. Google is fighting to keep its
search engine relevant and must constantly evolve to continue delivering
relevant results to users.

This hasn't been without its challenges. Just like keyword stuffing,
webmasters eventually clued onto another way of gaming the system by
having the most anchor text pointing to the page.
If you are not familiar with this term, anchor text is the text contained in
external links pointing to a page.
This created another loophole exploited by spammers. In many cases, wellmeaning
marketers and business owners used this tactic to achieve high
rankings in the search results.
Along came a new Google update in 2012, this time called Penguin. Google's
Penguin update punished sites with suspicious amounts of links with the
same anchor text pointing to a page, by completely delisting sites from the
search results. Many businesses that relied on search engine traffic lost all of
their sales literally overnight, just because Google believed sites with
hundreds of links containing just one phrase didn't acquire those links
naturally. Google believed this was a solid indicator the site owner could be
gaming the system.
If you find these changes alarming, don't. How to recover from these
changes, or to prevent being penalized by new updates, is covered in later
chapters. In the short history of Google's major updates, we can discover two
powerful lessons for achieving top rankings in Google.
1. If you want to stay at the top of Google, never rely on one tactic.
2. Always ensure your search engine strategies rely on SEO best practices.
Authority, trust & relevance. Three powerful SEO
strategies explained.Google has evolved considerably from its humble origins in 1993.
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, once reported that Google considered
over 200 factors to determine which sites rank higher in the results.
Today, Google has well over 200 factors. Google assesses how many links
are pointing to your site, how trustworthy these linking sites are, how many
social mentions your brand has, how relevant your page is, how old your site
is, how fast your site loads… and the list goes on.
Does this mean it's impossible or difficult to get top rankings in Google?
Nope. In fact, you can have the advantage.
Google’s algorithm is complex, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to
understand how it works. In fact, it can be ridiculously simple if you
remember just three principles. With these three principles, you can
determine why one site ranks higher than another, or discover what you have
to do to push your site higher than a competitor. These three principles
summarize what Google are focusing on in their algorithm now, and are the
most powerful strategies SEO professionals are using to their advantage to
gain rankings.
The three key principles are: Trust, Authority and Relevance.
1. Trust.
Trust is at the very core of Google’s major changes and updates the past
several years. Google wants to keep poor-quality, untrustworthy sites out of
the search results, and keep high-quality, legit sites at the top. If your site has
high-quality content and backlinks from reputable sources, your site is more
likely to be considered a trustworthy source, and more likely to rank higher in
the search results.
2. Authority
Previously the most popular SEO strategy, authority is still powerful, but now
best used in tandem with the other two principles. Authority is your site’s
overall strength in your market. Authority is almost a numbers game, for
example: if your site has one thousand social media followers and backlinks,
and your competitors only have fifty social media followers and backlinks,
you’re probably going to rank higher.
3. Relevance.
Google looks at the contextual relevance of a site and rewards relevant sites
with higher rankings. This levels the playing field a bit, and might explain
why a niche site or local business can often rank higher than a Wikipedia
article. You can use this to your advantage by bulking out the content of your
site with relevant content, and use the on-page SEO techniques described in
later chapters to give Google a nudge to see that your site is relevant to your
market. You can rank higher with less links by focusing on building links
from relevant sites. Increasing relevance like this is a powerful strategy and
can lead to high rankings in competitive areas.
How Google ranks sites now—Google’s top 10
ranking factors revealed.
You may have wondered if you can find out the exact factors Google uses in
their algorithm.
Fortunately, there are a handful of industry leaders who have figured it out,
and regularly publish their findings on the Internet. With these publications,
you can get a working knowledge of what factors Google uses to rank sites.
These surveys are typically updated every second year, but these factors
don’t change often, so you can use them to your advantage by knowing
which areas to focus on.
Here ’ s a short list of some of the strongest factors found in sites ranking in
the top 10 search results, in the most recent study by Search Metrics:
- Overall content relevance.
- Click-through-rate.
- Time-on-site.
- Bounce rate (low bounce rates are better).
- HTTPS—security certificate installed on site.
- Font size in main content area (presumably people find larger fonts more
readable and leads to higher engagement).
- Number of images.
- Number of internal links.
- Total social media activity.
- Number of backlinks.
If your competitors have more of the above features than yours, then it’s
likely they will rank higher than you. If you have more of the above features
than competitors, then it is likely you will rank higher.
Combine this knowledge with an understanding of the Google updates
covered in later chapters, and you will know what it takes to achieve top
rankings.
The above factors are from the Search Metrics Google Ranking Factors study
released in 2016. Regrettably, after releasing the study, Search Metrics said
they would stop publishing their search rankings whitepapers in the future,
but you can be sure content relevance, user engagement, social activity, links,
site security (HTTPS), and most likely mobile support, are among current
ranking factors. If you want a deeper look into the study, you can browse the
full report by visiting the link below. I cover more recent updates to the
algorithm in the Google Algorithm updates chapter later in this book.
Search Metrics: Google Ranking Factors US
https://www.searchmetrics.com/knowledge-base/ranking-factors/
Another well-known authority on the SEO industry, called Moz (previously
SEOmoz), releases a rankings study every several years. Moz also publish
this information for free, and available at the following page.
Moz Ranking Factors Survey
https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors
How to stay ahead of Google’s updates.
Every now and then, Google releases a significant update to their algorithm,
which can have a massive impact on businesses from any industry. To hone
your SEO chops and make sure your site doesn't fall into Google's bad books,
it's important to stay informed of Google’s updates as they are released.
Fortunately, almost every time a major update is released, those updates are
reported on by the entire SEO community and sometimes publicly discussed
and confirmed by Google staff.

A long-extended history of Google’s updates would fill this entire book, but
with the resources below, you can stay abreast of new Google updates as they
are rolled out. This is essential knowledge for anyone practicing SEO, at a
beginner or an advanced level.
You can even keep your ear to the ground with these sources and often be
forewarned of future updates.
Google Updates by Search Engine Round Table
https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates
Search Engine Round Table is one of the industry’s leading blogs on SEO. At
the page above, you can browse all of the latest articles on Google updates by
a leading authority on the topic.
Search Engine Journal
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/category/search-engine-optimization/
Search Engine Journal is another authoritative, relevant and frequently
updated publication about everything SEO. An indispensable resource for
keeping abreast of industry events as they happen.
Moz Blog
https://moz.com/blog
The Moz blog is mentioned several times in this book and for good reason—
it’s among the leading authority blogs covering all things SEO, and if there’s
an impending update on the radar, you will catch wind of it her