Article Categories

SiteProNews Blogs

Google Share Their Ranking Philosophy

07 2008 Thursday

By Kalena Jordan in Kalena Jordan's Blog

In an official post on the Google Blog called Introduction to Google Ranking, Amit Singhal, Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team, has revealed some fascinating insights into the way Google search results are collated and ranked. In the process, he’s also busted a few common myths surrounding their elusive algorithm.

Here are some of the tidbits from Amit’s post that I found most interesting:

While web search is the most used Google search service, the same ranking algorithms are also used, with modifications, for other Google search services, including Images, News, YouTube, Maps, Product Search and Book Search.
Amit claims there is no manual intervention of search results, meaning that the final ordering of the results is decided by their algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by Google.
Whenever Google return less than ideal results for any query in any language in any country, they use that as an inspiration for future improvements. In Google’s opinion, a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to their ranking algorithm.
Google make about ten ranking changes every week and their engineers understand exactly why a page was ranked the way it was for a given query.
Google stand by their clear written policies for websites and do take action on sites that are in violation of those policies or for other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc).

12 Responses to “Google Share Their Ranking Philosophy”

Google sharing whats that all about.
Google dont normally share?
All the best Mick UK

Michael

July 14th, 2008

I thought Google admitted that they employ thousands of people who manually review and adjust the search engine results ? It makes sense when you see some poorly optimised sites at the top of the results

David Rankin

July 14th, 2008

I think people in the industry place too much importance on site optimization and forget that Google wants their users to find the content they are searching for. Those poorly optimized sites that hit the top of the list are there because “thousands of Google users” (the manual reviewers?) found what they were looking for.

Site optimization is not top priority when promoting a website, it’s just one tiny advantage. Give Google’s users what they want and Google will find you.

Timothy W. Lack

July 14th, 2008

Exactly. I thought Google employ thousands to do that. I understood from the various forums I visited saying that Google has a huge team of people doing the tweaking.

Not there is a turn to the story.

Tony

July 14th, 2008

In my recent experience those high ranking, poorly optimized sites have one thing in common: lots of inbound links.

People are still gaming the system but it may have become more “off page” than ever because these were literally ALL unearned, more than likely paid links from obscure directory sites that, I believe, no human being would ever use.

Sean Sloan

July 14th, 2008

I believe that opening up your web is very important in order to get people to enable new products on top of your content.

Jond Fond

July 14th, 2008

Why would I ever waste my time on a comment here again? Twenty-four hours and my comment is still “awaiting moderation.” Is there any specific reason or cause for this kind of control? Why not let the posts fly and delete the few you feel are spam?

Because you just lost a commenter.

Timothy W. Lack

July 15th, 2008

people who manually review? I won’t work for google if that is the case:)

web hosting

July 16th, 2008

Everyweek a google guy steps up and announce a statement about their ranking algorithm.

MGA

July 16th, 2008

it’s interesting…. in all fundamentals, Google is still secretive, of course it has to be so that people don’t game the system any more than they do. What’s revealed above doesn’t really say very much.