Google Search Engine Optimization Strategy

Google is a search engine that arrived on the scene in 1998, and was best known for displacing Inktomi in providing search results to Yahoo! It began life as the project of two Stanford University computer science Ph.D. candidates, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The word Google is a play on the word “googol,” which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. It refers to the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. That’s a very large number. According to Google there isn’t a googol of anything in the universe; not stars, not dust particles, perhaps not even atoms.

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Initially Google was called BackRub, named for what was its (at the time) unique ability to analyze the “back links” pointing to and from a given website as part of its algorithms to search results.
This approach to link analysis gained BackRub a growing reputation among those who had seen the technology. Today this technology is known as Google’s patented “PageRank” technology, and is a crucial step to consider in any search engine optimization strategy. Now it’s the search engine of choice for millions. Google’s fast, relevant results, and simple, clean interface, make it a leader among search engines.

But Google is about a lot more than just the Google search engine. It is a media giant, with an online advertising network that displayed ads for a gross revenue in excess of 1.6 billion in one year alone. While it has built significantly on its offerings with additional products and services, such as Picasa, Keyhole, Urchin and the like, the company has so far – at least publicly – made purchases all designed around improving the core Google search engine.

About The Google Search Engine

The Google search engine has its own proprietary bot, or spider, the Googlebot, with which it maintains its own spider based index that accepts free submissions, and also has a directory that uses DMOZ, or The Open Directory Project, for much of its raw data.

About Google PageRank

According to the guidelines on Google’s own web site, “when seeking to promote a web site to Google… Google’s position is that we prefer no hidden links, no hidden text, no automatic tools used for positioning, and no cloaking. We prefer that Googlebot get the exact same page that users see. In general, you can assume that we’re as conservative as possible.
We don’t like hidden links/text in divs/layers/iframes/css, or links that are inconspicuous or punctuation, for example. Similarly, we don’t like cloaking or sneaky redirects in any form, whether it be user agent/ip-based, or redirects through javascript, meta refreshes, 301/302’s, or 100% frames.” More details on their policies are available at Google Guidelines. Even without the above, like all other search engines, there are numerous things that the Google search engine looks for.

With regards to their PageRank Technology, “PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page’s importance by the number of votes it receives. Most importantly, and often overlooked, PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. Important pages receive a higher PageRank and appear closer to the top of the search results. Google’s technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance. There is no human involvement or manipulation of results.”

Finally, “Google’s search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), Google’s technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. Google also analyzes the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.”

Google Search Submission Times

Upon submitting to Google, it can take up to 8 weeks for your site to be listed in the index. Google will re-spider every page in its database approximately once every 5 weeks and usually publishes a major update shortly thereafter.

The Google Dance

We get a lot of questions about this, so we wrote a whole section just on the Google Dance. Please read it to learn more about this monthly event.

The following search engines or directories provide content to Google:

• Open Directory Project

Interesting Facts From Google

If you want to see how people around the world are using Google, follow this link to

• Google’s Fact Page

Ways To Check Google

Here are a couple of different ways to use Google, and to look for very specific data about your own site. It’s also a good way to check which pages have been indexed.

• link:www.sitename.com – Shows other pages with links to any site. (replace the word ‘sitename’ with the url you are checking against. Test it on Google here.
• allintitle:www.sitename.com: keywords – Shows only results with terms in title.

Separately, Google is well known for their Adsense and Adwords network. Adwords allows you to bid (see Pay for Click) on keywords and phrases, and have your ad appear via an Adsense banner, whenever a similar search is run, or whenever someone displays one of the Adsense banners on a web page which features similar content to your Adword terms.