Googles Thought Process
By user | Uncategorized
Google has 1 main regarding organic search results.
They want to be the best search engine out there that brings back the best results.
How do you determine the best results?
Relevance & Quality.
Relevance is finding pages that cover the topic / details that the user is searching for
The more specific the query the more specific the results, the less specific the query the less specific the results.
Searching for “help” is a pretty non specific query that will bring back either non-specific sites relating to “help” in general like
HelpUSA.com
Or specific intentions of what people most often are looking for when they search for “help”.
Help – The beatles song, Help the dictionary definition, Help the movie
Searching for “help installing car seat” is a relatively specific example and google now try to only show you websites that are giving you information on how to install a car seat.
Quality is about ordering the relevant webpages based on their quality
Quality can be measured in multiple ways.
One way google measures quality is based on content, if you have good quality content on your website google will show you higher.
They can detect this by looking at word count, analysis of page structure, uniqueness of content, and even by watching the behavior of users visiting your site and their engagement, or how quickly they leave.
They also can judge quality of your webpage, and your whole website’s domain by looking at who else on the web vouches for you.
Google does this by looking at links (backlinks) to your website.
If another website that google has already judged to be high quality has linked to your website or your article, Google assumes that you must have a quality website with quality content.
Why else would another reputable website want to link to you unless they thought you had quality content on their website that would be useful to their readers.
Now the more of these quality signals (backlinks from reputable sites) you naturally have, the more google will trust your website
Gaming Google and the repercussions
Now you have an idea of how Google decides which sites should show up on that first page of Google and how it ranks them.
You might now start having a lot of clever ideas like
If Google determines quality by how many backlinks my site has I can just pay someone $10 to create thousands of them for me.
You won’t be the first person to think of this idea and you won’t be the first person to get your website penalized
Google makes billions of dollars off of their search engine, and if they were so easily fooled, then you’d have a lot of really low quality sites constantly making their way to the top of search results.
That would lose Google searchers (and they make billions by showing advertisements to their searchers).
Google put’s in place many validations to help automatically prevent sites that are trying to game their system from showing up.
If you have thousands of backlinks to your site created in a couple days, you are probably going to get penalized, because noone naturally gets that many backlinks to their website that fast.
If your backlinks created to your website all come from hosting provider you are probably going to get penalized.
If your backlinks heavily come from sites that google has flagged as being abused you are probably going to get penalized.
So how do I increase my rankings then?
You have a couple options to try to increase your rankings.
1: Use this explanation of how Google works and do everything in your power to increase relevance and quality, but always ask yourself whether what you are doing is natural.
If it benefits readers it is probably natural.
2: Use this explanation to help you find an SEO agency that actually knows what they are doing
Any work they are doing on your website (in terms of ranking in google) should be either about increasing relevance or quality.
If they use some terms you don’t understand, ask them why they are doing it and which of those it helps out with.
If they are recommending tactics to inflate your relevance or quality, think about whether it sounds natural.
Copying and pasting the exact same paragraph over and over to increase your word count is not natural and you should be concerned if your SEO recommends it.
Receiving thousands of backlinks in a few days is not natural and you should be concerned if your SEO recommends it.
There are some exceptions to this rule.
There are some “unnatural techniques” that SEO’s use because everyone else is doing it, and you therefore have to “play dirty” if you want to compete with them.
If so you can ask them for proof that others are doing it.
There are also “unnatural techniques” that SEO’s use because your budget cannot afford the “natural version” of the technique, and they take steps to make it appear as natural as possible and reduce risks of getting penalized.
A great SEO knows how to walk the fine line between risk and reward and balance it against your budget.