From the Horse’s Mouth - Google Ranking Technology

Last week Google filed this, their annual SEC report. For most it’s a lesson in boredom. But for the SEO-minded, it’s a potential gold mine. I liked the excerpts on on-page ranking factors:

Ranking Technology. One element of our technology for ranking web pages is called PageRank. While we developed much of our ranking technology after Google was formed, PageRank was developed at Stanford University with the involvement of our founders, and was therefore published as research. Most of our current ranking technology is protected as trade-secret. PageRank is a query-independent technique for determining the importance of web pages by looking at the link structure of the web. PageRank treats a link from web page A to web page B as a “vote” by page A in favor of page B. The PageRank of a page is the sum of the PageRank of the pages that link to it. The PageRank of a web page also depends on the importance (or PageRank) of the other web pages casting the votes. Votes cast by important web pages with high PageRank weigh more heavily and are more influential in deciding the PageRank of pages on the web.

Text-Matching Techniques. Our technology employs text-matching techniques that compare search queries with the content of web pages to help determine relevance. Our text-based scoring techniques do far more than count the number of times a search term appears on a web page. For example, our technology determines the proximity of individual search terms to each other on a given web page, and prioritizes results that have the search terms near each other. Many other aspects of a page’s content are factored into the equation, as is the content of pages that link to the page in question. By combining query independent measures such as PageRank with our text-matching techniques, we are able to deliver search results that are relevant to what people are trying to find.

SEO wrapped up in a couple paragraphs. Nice!