Posted on February 22, 2011 by admin
If you haven’t read part 1 click here
Google wants to give its users the best customer experience possible. Therefore it is very important that they deliver HIGHLY RELEVANT results to all their customers/searchers. This is the cornerstone of Google’s entire business, if they don’t produce good search results their customers are going to start using other search engines like Yahoo, Bing etc.
So we know that the Google Algorithm (ranking process) is all about asking LOTS of questions. But how do we find out what questions Google are asking of our Websites. Matt Cutt’s (from Google) says that Google ask over 200 questions – I have a sneaky suspicion it is a LOT more than that.
The way we find out what the infamous questions are is through testing, experience and a gut feel. Pretty soon you start to see what works and what doesn’t. All of these 200 plus questions can be broken down into 2 sections.
Google needs to have a way of balancing the topicality/content (Onsite) of a website with the authority (Offsite) of the website. Google sees some websites as having more authority than others. For instance The Herald Sun website obviously has more authority than a little blog that has 5 posts about “how to make watermelon juice”.
But does that mean that this small blog will never be able to outrank a huge site like http://www.heraldsun.com.au? Absolutely not – If Google did this then the results they displayed wouldn’t be relevant.
For instance, if someone typed ‘how to make watermelon juice’ into Google which site would you rather see – a 5 post blog that tells you everything there is to know about making watermelon juice? Or an article from the Herald sun site that is about a football teams preseason training (but happens to mention the words watermelon juice once)?
Google has to balance the importance of the content and authority of all websites. Let’s have a quick look at the different types of questions Google asks.
Onsite Questions:
Does the website…
- use the exact search phrase more than once?
- use the search phrase in a different order?
- use the search term in the Title?
- use the search term in the URL?
- use synonyms of the search phrase?
- use LSI words (relevant words to the search phrase)?
- have photos that are labelled with titles relevant to the search phrase?
- have a Google Friendly structure?
- link to sites that are relevant to the search phrase?
Offsite Questions
Does the website…
- have a good reputation or is it a bit spammy?
- have other pages that relate to the search phrase?
- have a low or high page rank?
- have incoming links from relevant sites?
- have incoming links that use anchor text that is the same as the search phrase?
Every time someone types a search phrase into Google it asks all of these questions (plus another 200 or so we haven’t mentioned) to every website that it knows. Every website that shows some relevance to the search phrase is given a score based on how well they answered the questions. The website that gets the highest score is rewarded with the no.1 ranking in Google’s results.
Simple as that 
