Page Rank in Google’s own Words

November 20, 2009 at 5:42 am | Posted in SEO, SEO-Basic, Uncategorized | Leave a comment
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Google explains PageRank as follows:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an Indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

The Google Toolbar

You can download Google Toolbar (free) and install it in your Internet Explorer within minutes. Amongst other useful features, it displays the PageRank of each web page you visit.

The Google toolbar appears just below your Internet Explorer browser and can be used for making a search on the web from any page. Google toolbar displays the PageRank of each web page on a scale of 1-10. If you have the Google toolbar installed in your browser, you would be used to seeing each page’s PageRank as you browse the web. Google does not display the PageRank of web pages that it has not indexed. Please note that the Toolbar displays the PageRank of individual pages and not the site as a whole.

We will see Relationship between Search Engine Ranking and PageRank in next post.

History of Site Ranking

November 18, 2009 at 11:06 am | Posted in SEO, SEO-Basic, Uncategorized | Leave a comment
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In the early 1990′s when the web was emerging, several sites having industry specific content were being added to the web each day. Web surfers, on the other hand, had very few tools to locate such sites, which they believed were out there but did not have a clue about their domain names or web addresses. With the birth of Yahoo in 1993, surfers were offered some relief. Yahoo classified each site it discovered in a neatly organized directory list and also embedded a search engine in its site to search for sites based on ‘keywords’ existing in its database. Several other search engines like AltaVista, Excite, and Lycos etc. followed the search trends offering site search facilities to users. Most of these search engines relied heavily on Meta Tags to classify the relevance of websites based on the keywords they found in the tags.

Things seemed to work out fine before site owners and webmasters realized the value of how they can ‘embed’ industry specific keyword phrases in their Meta Tags and other site code, thus manipulating their way to show up higher in search results. Over a period of time, search engine results started getting cluttered with sites that spammed their content with relevant keywords but had poor site content for the visitor. The very essence, credibility and importance of search engines was now being challenged to deal with how they could offer a more refined search output to their users.

Google’s Query Processor

November 17, 2009 at 7:24 am | Posted in SEO, SEO-Basic, Uncategorized | Leave a comment
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The query processor has several parts, including the user interface (search box); the “engine” that evaluates queries and matches them to relevant documents, and the results formatter.

Google considers over a hundred factors in determining which documents are most relevant to a query, including the popularity of the page, the position and size of the search terms within the page, and the

proximity of the search terms to one another on the page. PageRank is Google’s system for ranking web pages.

Google also applies machine-learning techniques to improve its performance automatically by learning relationships and associations within the stored data. For example, the spelling-correcting system uses such techniques to figure out likely alternative spellings

Indexing the full text of the web allows Google to go beyond simply matching single search terms. Google gives more priority to pages that have search terms near each other and in the same order as the query. Google can also match multi-word phrases and sentences. Since Google indexes HTML code in addition to the text on the page, users can restrict searches on the basis of where query words appear, e.g., in the title, in the URL, in the body, and in links to the page, options offered by the Advanced-Search page and search operators.

Google:A Brief Overview

November 14, 2009 at 6:09 am | Posted in SEO, SEO-Basic, Uncategorized | Leave a comment
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What is Google?

“Googol” is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. Google’s play on the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.

Google Technology

Google.com began as an academic search engine. In the paper that describes how the system was built, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page give an example of how quickly their spiders can work. They built their initial system to use multiple spiders, usually three at one time. Each spider could keep about 300 connections to Web pages open at a time. At its peak performance, using four spiders, their system could crawl over 100 pages per second, generating around 600 kilobytes of data each second.

Google runs on a distributed network of thousands of low-cost computers and can therefore carry out fast parallel processing. Parallel processing is a method of computation in which many calculations can be performed simultaneously, significantly speeding up data processing. Google has three distinct parts:

  •  Googlebot, a web crawler that finds and fetches web pages.
  • The indexer that sorts every word on every page and stores the resulting index of words in a huge database.
  • The query processor, which compares your search query to the index and recommends the documents that it considers most relevant.

Let’s take a closer look at each part on next post.

Types of Search Engines

November 13, 2009 at 5:16 am | Posted in SEO, SEO-Basic, Uncategorized | Leave a comment
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The term “search engine” is often used generically to describe both crawler-based search engines and human-powered directories. These two types of search engines gather their listings in radically different ways.

Crawler-Based Search Engines

Crawler-based search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. They “crawl” or “spider” the web, then people search through what they have found.

If you change your web pages, crawler-based search engines eventually find these changes, and that can affect how you are listed. Page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role.

Human-Powered Directories

A human-powered directory, such as the Open Directory, depends on humans for its listings. You submit a short description to the directory for your entire site, or editors write one for sites they review. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted.

Changing your web pages has no effect on your listing. Things that are useful for improving a listing with a search engine have nothing to do with improving a listing in a directory. The only exception is that a good site, with good content, might be more likely to get reviewed for free than a poor site.

“Hybrid Search Engines” Or Mixed Results

In the web’s early days, it used to be that a search engine either presented crawler-based results or human-powered listings. Today, it’s extremely common for both types of results to be presented. Usually, a hybrid search engine will favor one type of listings over another. For example, MSN Search is more likely to present human-powered listings from LookSmart. However, it does also present crawler-based results (as provided by Inktomi), especially for more obscure queries.

What is Search Engine?

November 12, 2009 at 6:35 am | Posted in SEO, SEO-Basic, Uncategorized | Leave a comment
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Search engines (i.e. Google, Bing…) are tools which are extremely helpful to users for gathering web pages or information on given subject. Search engines generally maintains large database and use special programs referred as “spider” or “Robot” to collect information for this data base, Which will be indexed later by search engine. Directories also maintains ordered list of web pages or websites.

How Search Engines Work?

World Wide Web is exceptionally good news for all the people who are finding information on the internet. World Wide Web has several millions of web pages which presents information on various topics.

These web pages are helpful to us when we need to know about particular subject but problem is how we know that this information is available on which web pages. At this need of search engine arise.

Search engines are specially designed websites on the web to help people who are finding information on particular subject or need data from particular subject from other websites.

There are differences in the ways various search engines work, but they all perform three basic tasks:

  • They search the Internet — or select pieces of the Internet — based on important words.
  • They keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them.
  • They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index.

In early times search engines held an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand inquiries each day. Today, a top search engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries per day.

Before a search engine can tell you where a file or document is, it must be found. To find information on the hundreds of millions of Web pages that exist, a search engine employs special software robots, called spiders, to build lists of the words found on Web sites. When a spider is building its lists, the process is called Web crawling. (There are some disadvantages to calling part of the Internet the World Wide Web — a large set of arachnid-centric names for tools is one of them.) In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, a search engine’s spiders have to look at a lot of pages.

How does any spider start its travels over the Web? The usual starting points are lists of heavily used servers and very popular pages. The spider will begin with a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within the site. In this way, the spidering system quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the most widely used portions of the Web.

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