How To Make Links And Influence Google

A little over two years ago, a small upstart search engine called Google began ruffling the feathers of the search engine industry by rewriting the rules on how search engines should rank sites.

With its revolutionary ranking algorithm, and aggressive spidering technique, Google has now risen to the extent that only Yahoo and MSN better its dominance worldwide. Of the big three, Google is the only one that offers ONLY search facilities; MSN and Yahoo are both portal models.

The revolutionary thinking behind Google's ranking model is that Google assumes that if somebody links to your site, then that link counts as a vote for your site. So, the more links to your site, the more votes for your site, and so the higher ranked it will be. Moreover, each link to your site is given a weighting by Yahoo depending on how 'important' Google views that link.

Google are fiercely protective of their ranking algorithms and it is left to competitors and submission experts to speculate on how Google actually realises this model, and hence how best to optimise your site for Google. This fierce protect has of course given Google an advantage in that it has been notoriously difficult to spam, which has long been the bugbear of spider-based search properties. Occasionally one method will become apparent, but Google are quick to close such loopholes.

Bigmouthmedia have carried out extensive empirical research into the operation of Google, for the benefit of achieving realistic, accurate, and rightful positioning of clients. While we are not about to publish the findings of this research, we will sum up the information that is commonly known about Google here for you.

First of all, it is important to have people link to your site. The more links the better (on the whole). However, remember that Google counts the quality of links as well as the quantity. It is better to have one link from a related topic site than 100 from unrelated sites. Also, the link popularity of the sites linking to you will affect the weighting Google gives to the links to you.

Don't forget also that body text is another important consideration for Google. Make sure that your site is keyword rich and optimised correctly as it would be for any other spider based search engine.

Finally, Google struggles with framesets unless they have been correctly optimised for search engine spiders, make sure that if you use a frameset, you use one correctly.




This article was first published on 12 April 2002 and does not necessarily match current events or the current opinions and views of bigmouthmedia ltd.

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