Pike's SEO Tactics - Google

Google is the most popular search engine so any SEO specialist gives it special treatment to ensure their website scores highly in Google. The most important part of the Google algorithm is called Page Rank but internal optimizations also play a large roll in Google's ranking.

The Google page rank displays the overall worth of the links to your page that Google has given your page. Page rank or PR is expressed as a number between 0 and 9. A PR 9 is the highest page rank given and many major websites are not worthy of it. It is a logarithmic scale so moving from a PR 4 to PR 5 requires fewer additional links than from PR 5 to PR 6.

The page rank that is displayed on the Google website and the toolbar is notoriously out of date. Lately, it has been updated at the end of each quarter but there is no set schedule. A PR 0 generally means the page was created after the last update. Only if the bar is gray and the 'site:www.domain.com' command gives no results then the site is actually banned.

The few and far between updates to the visible page rank ensures that only Google engineers really know how it is calculated. The following however can been easily inferred:

1. More links are better
2. Quality links are even better

What determines a quality link to the algorithm can also be guessed at: (in order of degree of certainty)

1. The page rank of the linking page
2. The number of links on the linking page
3. If the link is one-way (If there is no reciprocal link then the linked to page benefits more)
4. The age of the link
5. If the two pages have similar content *

* The last is considered to be an experimental direction Google is moving towards.

The PR gained by the page may also be dampened if "SEO tactics" (excessive internal and external page optimization) is found by Google's algorithm. In extreme cases, websites which do not follow Google's guidelines on links and other internal optimizations will be auto-banned by Google's algorithm or will be banned once brought to a Google employees attention.

Recently, a popular ? was banned after it was found to be hiding links from its high PR homepage to articles written specifically to capture advertising dollars. Once a website is unbanned, it is treated as a brand new website.

From March 2004 onwards, web site owners started noticing that web sites placed on new domain addresses previously not in Google's index were having a hard time getting well ranking pages on desirable key word phrases. The web site's poor performance continued regardless of how many quality links were added.

Numerous theories (including Google wants me to buy ads from them) about why this now occurs have been thought up. The two most likely is that brand new incoming links are no longer scored as highly as older links and/or Google now applies a filter which favors older sites as more trustworthy and authoritative sources.