How important is it that Google provide the right answer each user’s queries? According to a NY Times interview with part of the team of hundreds of Google engineers that toil night and day to maintain superiority over Yahoo and MSN search, it is everything!

“The fundamental value created by Google is the ranking,” says John Battelle, the chief executive of Federated Media, a blog ad network, and author of “The Search,” a book about Google.

It seems that many online stores achieve 25%-50% of their traffic, and most of their new customers from search engines. Since Google’s share of search exceeds 43% those numbers can easily translate into success or failure.

Mr. Manber (a member of the Google team) says you must balance, tweak and control “You make a change, and it affects some queries positively and others negatively". Always revamping, always tweaking the algorithm to return the most pertinent results giving greater weight for some pages and less for others.

Mr. Singhal is very careful in making changes to the algorithm, as a small change can mean moving a few websites up, and could cause a dramatic drop in dozens of others, many potentially earning a bulk of their income form Googles results.

Recently Google has made a very important change to the algorithm, a "freshness" change. Where in the past, Google gave more credence to "older" more established sites, now "hot" actively changing sites with current information is what generally ends up on the top.

While Google constantly is scanning all the millions of pages of the Web, it calculates it own internal number called PageRank. Sites that are more popular (high PageRank), are considered likely to be of higher quality. Pages that are linked from these higher PageRank sites often themselves gain PageRank standings.

Google’s "Mr. Singhal has developed a far more sophisticated system for ranking websites and PageRank is just one of those signals. Some of the signals are on Websites pages — like words, links, images and so on. Some are drawn from the history of how pages have changed over the course of time. Some signals are data patterns uncovered in the trillions of searches that Google has handled over the years."

Companies such as GetMeOnTop.com achieve high rankings for their clients by manipulating their clients’ websites to adhere as closely as possible to Googles "secret algorithm". Though they do not have special access to any of the search engines algorithms, they can through years of experience and using the successful patterns of other sites they can often achieve the coveted top 3 rankings for their clients. Mr. Josephson, CEO of GetMeOnTop states "Our success rate in 90+%, experience, perseverance, constant adjustment and adhering strictly to the use of "Meta" information has made us successful"

“People still think that Google is the gold standard of search,” Mr. Battelle from Google states. “Their secret sauce is how these guys are doing it all in aggregate. There are 1,000 little tunings they do.”

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 5:51 am and is filed under SEO Tips and Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.