Google's Guidelines

Guidelines for Web Pages

Google is still by far the most popular and most well used search engine and is likely to account for at least 50 percent and probably a lot more of the search engine traffic that arrives at most websites. In order to function effectively as a search engine Google has to have not only highly sophisticated search engine technology that works 24 hours per day on a grand scale, but it also needs to and be seen to rank websites in a way which is as ‘fair’ and as helpful to the search engine user as possible. The nature of the search engine business however means that is necessary for Google to keep the exact nature of how and why it ranks web pages in a certain way a secret. The formulae / decision trees which are at the centre of this system are called ‘algorithms. As far as we know, these algorithms are changed, albeit incrementally, approximately 300 to 400 times per year. The secrecy surrounding their exact content is necessary to stop everybody finding out exactly what they need to do to get to the very top of the search engines, and to protect the valuable search engine technology which is one of the elements that gives Google its competitive advantage.

Where the natural text searches are concerned, as a search engine Google needs to deliver results to its end users which are not only relevant to their enquiry, but will also provide the best experience. In order to do this Google needs to be able to find pages, make good ‘sense’ of their content, categorise them, and basically establish their degree of relative relevance to and importance for specific queries. Since there are many different types of content to include, a vast amount of existing content and huge amounts of content being uploaded to the web every day, the task for search engines is formidable. Google uses its ‘Caffeine’ system for finding content and including it in the search engines as soon as possible. Google’s new ‘Instant’ searching system allows users of the search engine to see predictive suggested key phrases and search engine results as they type.

Google publicly tells us that it uses approximately 200 ‘signals’ in a web page which correspond to weightings in the algorithms which basically decide where the page ranks for a specific query. Like the algorithms themselves, exactly what these signals are and the weighting and importance given to each of them at any given point in time aren’t exactly known. There are however many ‘signals’ that we can be sure are very important in ranking pages and therefore in SEO. These include among other things the quality and nature of the incoming links, the text content, the URL(s), and the page/document title.

To help and encourage people to develop web content which will be of maximum value and interest, and to give that content the best chance of ranking well, Google publishes some useful information in the Webmaster Central area of its own website such as the Webmaster Guidelines, Webmaster Tools on YouTube, and a Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide.