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How does Google rank results?

A nice new SEO overview courtesy of Matt Cutts:

How do we find pages that contain the user’s query? Let’s return to our civil war example. The word “civil” was in documents 3, 8, 22, 56, 68, and 92; the word “war” was in documents 2, 8, 15, 22, 68, and 77.

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Now we have the set of pages that contain the user’s query somewhere, and it’s time to rank them in terms of relevance. Google uses many factors in ranking. Of these, the PageRank algorithm might be the best known. PageRank evaluates two things: how many links there are to a web page from other pages, and the quality of the linking sites. With PageRank, five or six high-quality links from websites such as www.cnn.com and www.nytimes.com would be valued much more highly than twice as many links from less reputable or established sites.

But we use many factors besides PageRank. For example, if a document contains the words “civil” and “war” right next to each other, it might be more relevant than a document discussing the Revolutionary War that happens to use the word “civil” somewhere else on the page. Also, if a page includes the words “civil war” in its title, that’s a hint that it might be more relevant than a document with the title “19th Century American Clothing.” In the same way, if the words “civil war” appear several times throughout the page, that page is more likely to be about the civil war than if the words only appear once.

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As a rule, Google tries to find pages that are both reputable and relevant. If two pages appear to have roughly the same amount of information matching a given query, we’ll usually try to pick the page that more trusted websites have chosen to link to. Still, we’ll often elevate a page with fewer links or lower PageRank if other signals suggest that the page is more relevant. For example, a web page dedicated entirely to the civil war is often more useful than an article that mentions the civil war in passing, even if the article is part of a reputable site such as Time.com.

Escaping the Sandbox - The Natural Way

Some tips for escaping the Sandbox in a natural way:

1. Start promoting your website the moment you create your website, not when your website is ‘ready’. Don’t make the mistake of waiting for your website to be ‘perfect’. The motto is to get your product out on the market, as quickly as possible, and then worry about improving it. Otherwise, how will you ever start to make money?
2. Establish a low-intensity, long-term link building plan and follow it religiously. For example, you can set yourself a target of acquiring 20 links per week, or maybe even a target of contacting 10 link partners a day. This will ensure that as you build your website, you also start acquiring inbound links and those links will age properly – so that by the time your website exits the Sandbox you would have both a high quantity of inbound links and a thriving website.
3. Avoid black-hat techniques such as keyword stuffing or ‘cloaking’. Google’s search algorithm evolves almost daily, and penalties for breaking the rules may keep you stuck in the Sandbox longer than usual.
4. Save your time by remembering the 20/80 rule: 80 percent of your optimization can be accomplished by just 20 percent of effort. After that, any tweaking left to be done is specific to current search engine tendencies and liable to become ineffective once a search engine updates its algorithm. Therefore don’t waste your time in optimizing for each and every search engine – just get the basics right and move on to the next page.

Get out of the Sandbox

From DaveN at Search Engine Watch:

ok in Chicago in the Organic panel I spoke about the sandbox and dupe content..

on the sandbox… try this .

so you have a site loads of content, yet you know deep down that you should be ranking but you’re not .. ( I can’t confirm or deny that this is the sandbox ), you have good links and a good site structure.. but still you don’t rank ( I can’t confirm or deny that this is the sandbox )

You rank in Yahoo and Msn .. but no where in Google ( I can’t confirm or deny that this is the sandbox ) ..

ok get an old domain, something which google crawls, then put a subdomain on it … newsite.olddomain.com original and copy the site exactly on the sub as it is in the orginal date last modifed to a few months after the domain was first registered … yer i know that makes all the content look really really old … lol

Ok add a Link from the real site something like www .newsite.com ( forget about seo anchor text links, these are just to let google in.. now 301 the subdomain to the new site ..

postscript :

Ok add a Link from the real site something like www .newsite.com ( forget about seo anchor text links, these are just to let google in.. now 301 the subdomain to the new site .. <--- this didn't make sense

Add a link from the www. oldsite.com to the newsite.oldsite.com forget about seo anchor text links, these are just to let google in.. now 301 the subdomain to the new site .... chicago brain freeze still going on lol

But now the cat’s out of the bag.

Revisiting Jagger

A nice Jagger synopsis that I had previously missed:

The Jagger Update was introduced for three main reasons. The first was to deal with manipulative link-network schemes, sites generated with scraped content and other forms of SE-Spam. The second was to allow and account for the inclusion a greater number of spiderable documents and file types. The third was to allow and account for new methods of site acquisition beyond the use of the spider Googlebot.

Yes, all your links are belong to Google.

Essentials Wrap-Up Vol. 1

• Defeating the Sandbox from Social Patterns
• The Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimization from SEOmoz
• Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2005 from Search Engine Roundtable

It’s the Google Trustbox, Not Sandbox

Mincing words? Maybe. But a guest post over at stuntdubl has a good argument about why calling it the “Sandbox” may be misleading.

First, what is the Sandbox?

A sandbox is not a penalty or even a ‘thing’ - it’s a collection of filters in G’s algo that causes a site (not a page) to not rank well for a period of time.

But why trust?

• [It commonly hits sites] released for the first time
• Filters are applied to certain keywords, and not to others
• Filters are usually applied for 6 months, but can be applied for up to 2 years
• Filters will look for behaviour of SEO’s or spamsters [including]
  • Talked about getting listed in lots of directories as one
  • Also talked about getting general directories rather than specific niche directories that are highly relevant to your product and service offering
  • Talked about getting links from sites that are known to sell links
  • Talked about getting lots of traffic as something that can not only keep you out of the sandbox, but a definite proven method to get you out once you are in!
  • Of course a good by-product of getting an authority site to send you initial traffic is that they often lead to your gathering a number of OWL’s
    from other sites.

    Eg. Prweb article gets picked up by Y and G newsfeeds and in turn these 3 sites will be read by thousands. This could lead to your site either being republished online by other news sites, or just in webmasters giving you a link because they like your article. So between the lines something that probably has an impact is your gathering natural looking OWL (one way links) after getting the quality link.