Weekly SEO news: 10 January 2006
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

This week, we're taking a look at an official Google document that explains how to get high rankings on Google.

In the news: Google increases the lead over Yahoo and releases a video store, Yahoo's toolbar has the biggest market share and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Official Google statement: How does Google collect and rank results?

Google recently released an official explanation of how they rank results in their newsletter for librarians. In this document, Google engineer Matt Cutts explains how Google decides what result goes at the top of the list.

Here are the most important facts from the document:

1. Getting indexed by Google does not mean that you are in the index

Many webmasters still think that a visit of Googlebot means that they should now be in Google's index. That's not the case, after indexing a web page, Google has to do many things with the indexed pages before they can be found in the results:

"Our first step is to crawl and index the billions of pages of the World Wide Web. [...] Our crawl has produces an enormous set of documents, but these documents aren't searchable yet. Without an index, if you wanted to find a term like civil war, our servers would have to read the complete text of every document every time you searched."

2. The keywords on your web pages are important

Some people claim that links are the only factor that will get you high rankings on Google. Google explains the importance of keywords on web pages in the document:

"So the next step is to build an index. [...] we juggle our data in order to list every document that contains a certain word. For example, the word 'civil' might occur in documents 3, 8, 22, 56, 68, and 92, while the word 'war' might occur in documents 2, 8, 15, 22, 68, and 77. [...]

Suppose someone comes to Google and types in civil war. In order to present and score the results, we need to do two things:

1. Find the set of pages that contain the user's query somewhere
2. Rank the matching pages in order of relevance
"

If you want to be found for a special keyword, it is important that this keyword appears on your web pages and that it appears in the right places.

3. The right links from other web pages are important

After using keywords to decide which web pages should be displayed in the results, Google uses a variety of algorithms to decide in which order these web pages should be displayed.

"Now we have the set of pages that contain the user's query somewhere, and it's time to rank them in terms of relevance. Google uses many factors in ranking. Of these, the PageRank algorithm might be the best known.

PageRank evaluates two things: how many links there are to a web page from other pages, and the quality of the linking sites. With PageRank, five or six high-quality links from websites such as www.cnn.com and www.nytimes.com would be valued much more highly than twice as many links from less reputable or established sites."

It's no surprise: The number and the quality of incoming links influence the ranking of your web pages on Google. Make sure that you have many incoming links that come from related and reputable web sites.

4. PageRank is not the only important factor

In contrast to public opinion, Google uses many more factors besides PageRank:

"But we use many factors besides PageRank. For example, if a document contains the words 'civil' and 'war' right next to each other, it might be more relevant than a document discussing the Revolutionary War that happens to use the word 'civil' somewhere else on the page.

Also, if a page includes the words 'civil war' in its title, that's a hint that it might be more relevant than a document with the title '19th Century American Clothing.' In the same way, if the words 'civil war' appear several times throughout the page, that page is more likely to be about the civil war than if the words only appear once."

That's exactly what IBP's Top 10 Optimizer does: It analyzes the top 10 ranked pages on Google and it tells you where exactly on your web pages and how often you should use your keywords so that you can get high high rankings on Google.

What does this mean for your web site?

To get high rankings on Google, you must have optimized web page content and many good incoming links.

We are happy that Google has released this document. It confirms that our website promotion tools IBP and ARELIS are exactly the right tools to get high Google rankings.

The official Google document also confirms the articles from our previous newsletter issues and the information of our free search engine optimization eBook. If you haven't downloaded this eBook yet, you should do it now. The eBook is a step-by-step guide to high rankings on Google, Yahoo, MSN and other important search engines.

It is very easy to read and it contains checklists so that you can quickly check if your web site is ready for search engines. The ebook is part of the IBP download and it can be selected in IBP's help menu.

2. Search engine news of the week

Google increases lead over Yahoo in search

"Google nabbed almost 40 percent of all searches in the U.S., a commanding lead of more than 10 percentage points over Yahoo, which took second place, comScore said on Friday. [...]

Overall, U.S. residents conducted 5.15 billion searches in November, up 9 percent. Google's search sites processed 2.05 billion of those searches, or 39.8 percent, followed by Yahoo sites with 1.52 billion, or 29.5 percent."



Sun-Times nets Google ad deal

"In a quiet and small-scale experiment, Google is running classified-like ads in the pages of the Sun-Times, which so far is the only newspaper participating in the Web-search behemoth's test. [...]

A Google spokesman declines to comment on Google's satisfaction with the test; the ads debuted on Dec. 9, and only 15 boxes have run so far."


Google opens online video store

"Google is to start selling video online, offering a way for people to search for and buy TV shows and more through its site. [...] US network CBS is making shows like CSI and Star Trek available to buy online."

Yahoo's toolbar beats Google's

    "Google Inc. leads in online search, but its Web browser toolbar fell to second place in November to Yahoo Inc.'s plug in. [...] Yahoo sites received 48.5 percent of toolbar searches, edging out Google's 46.4 percent."



Yahoo! Local, YellowPages.com partner

"Advertisers on YellowPages.com will soon have their listings distributed on Yahoo! Local and Yellow Pages, the two companies are expected to announce today."

 

Search engine newslets

  • Yahoo has a new front door for video search.
  • MSN Search seems to test DMOZ descriptions in search results (registration required).
  • SkyScanner.net is a new flight search engine.
  • ComScore releases November search engine rankings.
  • A new Google cartoon.
  • Take a look at a Google logo that you can change with your mouse.
  • Google plans to open representation in Russia in 2006.
  • Take a look at CES keynote remarks by Bill Gates.
3. Articles of the week
Search engines as leeches on the web

"Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors."



A Monster deal for Google?

"As Google bulks up in the online classifieds biz, some say a buyout of Monster could make sense. [...] Online job listing companies like Monster are rapidly growing as they steal business from newspapers' help-wanted sections. Analysts expect that Monster's sales will jump 19 percent this year, to nearly $1.2 billion, and that profits will surge 35 percent."



Yahoo, Google want bigger role

    "Google Inc. leads in online search, but its Web browser toolbar fell to second place in November to Yahoo Inc.'s plug in. [...] Yahoo sites received 48.5 percent of toolbar searches, edging out Google's 46.4 percent."



Google, Yahoo and Microsoft keynote at CES

    "Yahoo Inc. says it will release software to give people access to its e-mail, map guides and other services from TVs and mobile phones.

    The world's most-visited Web property and its chief rival, Google Inc., may not make computers or DVDs, but they want to be an integral part of how people use their devices in the rapidly emerging age of digital, portable media."

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4. Recommended resources

We're sure that our products will help you to improve your business. Other people also think so. We have just received the following statement about ARELIS:

"Simply the best link exchange management software available"

"No holes barred and no punches pulled – ARELIS by Axandra really is the one piece of software everyone with a web site should own. From Webmaster new-comer through to SEO specialists, ARELIS really will help you find and produce reciprocal links and links pages both easily and fast.

Our financial services and credit solutions site started to lag in the search engine rankings for our search term unsecured loans – what with all the various updates the likes of Google perform, our site dropped from page 1 to off the planet … so what was the matter ?

Quite simply, Credit Solutions 4 All.co.uk did not have enough quality incoming links (links from external sites) which in effect, count as votes for our url. So how did we remedy our link popularity?

Initially, we scoured the internet for like minded sites and asked for link exchanges. Very soon, we found this to be too time consuming as not only were we adding links to web pages but we were also noting the url of our link information which would enable us to check back to see if our link was / is still live – again, I cannot reiterate how time consuming all this was.

Our next step was to use software for the purpose of finding and managing our linking strategies but the downside was that most of the software available was first and foremost too technical to learn and use and far too expensive.

Various other options were also available to us online but as we have several url’s we wish to promote, paying a monthly fee per url made this avenue a costly venture.

In the Summer of 2005 we stumbled across ARELIS, downloaded the FREE trial and really put it through its paces – not only could ARELIS find link partners to exchange links with but it could build the links pages formatted to look like our very own site design. It doesn’t stop there either, ARELIS really does manage your linking process allowing you to see at a glance what stage your link exchange is at.

And furthermore, the Technical Support is the best we have EVER experienced and that was whilst in FREE trial mode. The ARELIS technical staff are so supportive, you will feel that they are a member of your SEO Marketing team – they are genuinely helpful, first class in their field and they answered ALL our questions within 24 hours.

Thank you Johannes for all your support – ARELIS is a MUST HAVE for all web site owners, the program is fantastic and easy to use and your technical support is the best on the planet.

We cannot praise ARELIS highly enough … so what are you waiting for – buy it now and see what a difference it can make to your workload and link exchange campaign.

Oops, forgot to mention – Axandra offer a 100% money back guarantee … although I would imagine nobody ever requests this service!"
Jane Newman
Webmaster & Search Engine Optimisation Specialist
Creative Web Design | SEO & Link Popularity

 

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