Good luck with that! The secret seems to be safe with Google at the moment. They give us just enough information to get by.
As far as search engines go, Google is so unbelievably successful and popular, it’s becoming the generic name for them – much like Band-Aid, Kleenex and Frisbee. Even my 74-year-old mother says she’s going to “Google” something. Many people would say Google is the best of the best and returns the most spot-on results no matter what you’re looking for. And it does this in mere seconds with the world’s most talked about process – its very own Google search algorithm.
There is a definite air of mystery, speculation and even paranoia about how the great minds at Google have organized every morsel of information on the Web to deliver the best results money can buy. And just before anyone figures anything out for sure, Google makes changes and improvements that further confound us. According to a YouTube video posted by Google’s Matt Cutts, they average at least one change per day to the algorithm, which they release in batches. In 2009 alone, he said, they made some 350-400 changes to the search algorithm!
What we do know is that their closely-guarded Google search engine algorithm is all about what they call PageRank. Using more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms to determine the importance of every single Web page, this system decides which sites get the coveted honor of being on the first page of Google and which have to follow behind. The value of each individual page is denoted by the PageRank, which is indicated on a scale of 1-10.
How do you get the higher scores and a desirable position within the Google rank algorithm? That’s where the millions of variables, etc. come in. There are inbound links and their values, internal linking, domain age, content, keywords, domain name, off-page strength, user data variables, the ramifications of penalties and about 491 million other factors involved. This is what we know and what we can influence. The rest is just conjecture, even all the viable formulas that are sprinkled throughout the blogosphere.
A final note, though. While the workings of the Google page rank algorithm are automated and non-human, there is a human element. One of the best ways to optimize a website and have a good chance at decent ranking is to consistently serve up top-shelf content, with relevant keywords in the body, headings and titles of every page. This practice attracts reputable natural backlinks that elevate your chances of not being lost in the sea of Web pages.
