Understanding Google's Algorithms
 

An algorithm is defined as: In mathematics, computing, and related subjects, an algorithm is an effective method for solving a problem using a finite sequence of instructions. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and many other fields.

Obviously, Google?s algorithm (or algo as I will refer to it from this point on) is a secrete and highly protected though some basic information can has been released publicly since the release of their patent.

The purpose of this article is to give you a basic idea of what Google is doing on their end when reviewing each website they spider. Although the algo has slight frequent changes, the basics have remained the same for years and seem to be a permanent structure. Reminder, this article is not going to put you #1 for your keyword, there is obviously a lot more to SEO then knowing the Algo, but using the Algo to your benefits will definitely get you on the right track to earning your rankings.

Google?s Considerations when a Spider or Robot finds your site:

• Image Content ? Originality and Quality

• Note: Google cannot ?See? images thru their robots and spiders so renaming images and including proper keyword rich descriptive Alt tags give you the flexibility to be original. If all your images are named ####.jpg with 0 alt tags, then all spiders/robots are blind to how relevant this content is to your site.

• Textual Content ? Again, Original, Quality, Keyword Rich Text with proper tags throughout.

• Know the keywords most fit for your niche or content and use that keyword frequently while not over saturating it. Simple <b>keyword</b> tags used randomly throughout your site is also good thing and frequently over looked by many site owners. This tells Google that you?re emphasizing this word for a reason and they instantly know whether or not that reason is valid and why you did it. Again, do not over use this method or you will be considered ?Spammy? which you obviously don?t want to happen. 2 to 3 <b> texts are plenty.

• Outbound links ? It is critical that if you are going to have numerous outbound links to sponsors, or hosted image pages, etc that you use no_follow tags. All inbound links to other pages of your site are highly recommended to follow unless leading to a page you don?t want indexed, but the most frequent error I see webmasters making is linking to 100?s of sponsors and giving them all your link juice while seeing nothing in return. These days, it?s safe to have 75 or less outbound links which may seem like a lot to many, but quickly adds up in a short period of time.

• Cataloguing Keywords ? Google can instantly determine your keywords, their frequency and relevancy upon spidering your site. Frequent changes in these can make the site look inconsistent and unreliable so for all tgp/blog/tube owners out there, you need to get some good solid ?Static? keyword rich text on your site.

• Meta Tags ? For years I have heard meta tags are dead and I not only highly disagree, the proof is in the pudding. Meta tags pull a lot of weight and are first to get spidered if your site is properly optimized.

• Title ? This is the most important yet most commonly abused or improperly written. Google has a standard for the amount of characters as well as the type of characters used. Keep it under 66 characters with spaces and relevant to your content while using keywords you?re seeking. In addition, and though Google will still list you with characters such as ?&?, Google spiders do not see the characters as ?&?, they actually read it as an ?alt? which they are smart enough to code, but it still effects your title relevancy score therefore lowering your over all SEO score. In addition, it?s recommended to use a hyphen (-) in place of an underscore (_) for spidering purposes as well. Keep the title from looking spammy, too many keywords, misspelled words, too many characters and non-recommended characters are going to affect your rankings. Google loves quality, not crap.

• Description ? Google will place this info under your title in their listings. Make it dynamic, descriptive and keyword rich while staying under 150 characters. Do NOT use the same keyword more than 3 times max to avoid looking spammy.

• Keywords ? Google scans these, and though not critically important for Google, they do pull weight if kept under 800 characters with no more the 3 usages per keyword, but other search engines still rely heavily on them. I never overlook using them and when done properly, do assist in your rankings.

• Inbound Links ? Google wants to see that other related quality sites are linking into you. I cannot express quality enough. Do some research into every site you consider buying a link on, as well as network wide links. Stay away from ?FFA? (free for all) link pages in which 1000?s of sites are linking from. This can be a huge blow to your rankings and cause detrimental damage to your listings. Make sure you apply slight changes to your titles and anchors as you build your links. Using the same phrases/anchors over and over again looks spammy and quickly picked up by Google. Below are a few things you don?t want to over look:

• Content Relevancy

• Age

• Pages Indexed

• Server side stats ? how many server changes have occurred, how many dns changes, how many who is records, etc. Too many of any of these makes the site look unstable.

• Ip?s and multi c-class servers ? Anytime you?re getting links on multiple sites, look into their ip?s and c-class server setup. If sites are sharing an IP and you still want them to link to you, be sure to mix up your anchors and titles. Using the same Anchor/Title on multiple c-class IPs if fine, but don?t overdo it or Google will flag you for spam. Deep link where you can and as often as you can. To determine bulk PR, one of our go to sources is http://www.authoritydomains.com/bulk-ip-checker.php.

• Pagerank ? Page rank is not as important as many people think, though when valid gives you a quick idea of whether the site is properly managed. PR Zero sites can rank #1 on Google just as fast as a PR3+ but anytime a site has PR, this tells you that they have taken the time and effort to build their own links so chances are the site has some quality to it. Not all cases, but you will have to determine this on a site by site bases. A common question I get is how to tell if a site has Fake PR. Simple Google ? info:sitename.com and you should see the listing for the given site. If a different site pulls up, they are pulling the PR from that site. To check PR and Bulk PR we use http://checkbulkpagerank.com/

• Check HTML to assure they don?t have a no_follow on all links tag or you will get 0 juice from them. This is most commonly overlooked, especially when getting links from other blogs which can use no_follow plugins.

• Whois Information ? yes, believe it or not, Google will follow your site into your who is information provided by your hosting company which obviously knows your website, name, telephone number, email, physical address, how long your site is registered, etc. Since this is the case, I actually use meta tags that match my who is and have found that is pays off. An example of the meta info on one of our sites is as follows:

• <meta http-equiv="author" content="Adult SEO Services" />

• <meta http-equiv="contact" content="[email protected]" />

• <meta name="copyright" content="Copyright (c)2000-2009 X Rated SEO. All Rights Reserved." />

• Headings - <h1> and <h2> tags are most important and <h3> is always a good solid bonus. Your <h1> should pretty much be the main keyword you?re going after. <h2> should be describing that site in 3 to 5 words and most video titles, section titles, post titles, etc can be your <h3> tags. You can use css to control the look of the headings to assure it fits the theme of your site.

• Title and Alt tags ? plain and simple, all Large images need alt tags and all links need title tags.

• Sitemap ? both Html (link to this in your footer) and xml

• Robots.txt ? there are numerous setups for this and each varies depending on the site. For fun, you should check out Googles.. http://www.google.com/robots.txt

As you can see, and as many of you know, Google takes an extensive look into your site each time its spidered. SEO is a full time job for any site, and understanding the things Google looks for each time they visit your site is a good starting point to ranking your site.



About The Author:
Bobby Taylor, also known as 2bet, has spent nearly 11 years in the adult industry. In 2004, he successfully combined gaming and adult through Webmaster Poker Tournaments on 2bet.com. He credits the rapid growth of 2bet.com to successful search engine optimization, and moved solely into SEO in 2007. In 2008 SEO AP was publicly launched and recently in 2009, a sister company site, X RATED SEO emerged.

:thumbsup

Sig spot :)

Bobby, thanks for adding to our Educational Series! This topic is sure to warrant much discussion! :)

Looks like great info for the beginners.

Great read, thanks for taking the time.

Very good info Bobby :thumbsup

I'd like to add one other factor, very often overlooked, is having valid html/css code. While i don't have a solid case study, it's been my experience that valid documents rank better.

Not to mention, it's just a good practice anyways, as having valid code will prevent most cross-browser "surprises" and make your site more accessible. Validation check tools can also alert you to where you may have forgotten alt tags on images, etc...

I recommend using this free validation tool: http://validator.w3.org/

Good stuff bud :thumbsup

Great Writeup, I would mention that you should not use <b> tags at all however, they are deprecated...

<strong> for bold
<em> for emphasized (italics)

Are the correct standards :P

Some solid 101(and maybe 101,5) advice there :) This thread will be interesting.

Good job.

Nice read. Thank you kind sire.
:thumbsup

I FUCKING own Google:


Domain: 13 factors

1. Domain age;
2. Length of domain registration;
3. Domain registration information hidden/anonymous;
4. Site top level domain (geographical focus, e.g. com versus co.uk);
5. Site top level domain (e.g. .com versus .info);
6. Sub domain or root domain?
7. Domain past records (how often it changed IP);
8. Domain past owners (how often the owner was changed)
9. Keywords in the domain;
10. Domain IP;
11. Domain IP neighbors;
12. Domain external mentions (non-linked)
13. Geo-targeting settings in Google Webmaster Tools

Server-side: 2 factors

1. Server geographical location;
2. Server reliability / uptime

Architecture: 8 factors

1. URL structure;
2. HTML structure;
3. Semantic structure;
4. Use of external CSS / JS files;
5. Website structure accessibility (use of inaccessible navigation, JavaScript, etc);
6. Use of canonical URLs;
7. “Correct” HTML code (?);
8. Cookies usage;

Content: 14 factors

1. Content language
2. Content uniqueness;
3. Amount of content (text versus HTML);
4. Unlinked content density (links versus text);
5. Pure text content ratio (without links, images, code, etc)
6. Content topicality / timeliness (for seasonal searches for example);
7. Semantic information (phrase-based indexing and co-occurring phrase indicators)
8. Content flag for general category (transactional, informational, navigational)
9. Content / market niche
10. Flagged keywords usage (gambling, dating vocabulary)
11. Text in images (?)
12. Malicious content (possibly added by hackers);
13. Rampant mis-spelling of words, bad grammar, and 10,000 word screeds without punctuation;
14. Use of absolutely unique /new phrases.

Internal Cross Linking: 5 factors

1. # of internal links to page;
2. # of internal links to page with identical / targeted anchor text;
3. # of internal links to page from content (instead of navigation bar, breadcrumbs, etc);
4. # of links using “nofollow” attribute; (?)
5. Internal link density,

Website factors: 7 factors

1. Website Robots.txt file content
2. Overall site update frequency;
3. Overall site size (number of pages);
4. Age of the site since it was first discovered by Google
5. XML Sitemap;
6. On-page trust flags (Contact info ( for local search even more important), Privacy policy, TOS, and similar);
7. Website type (e.g. blog instead of informational sites in top 10)

Page-specific factors: 9 factors

1. Page meta Robots tags;
2. Page age;
3. Page freshness (Frequency of edits and
% of page effected (changed) by page edits);
4. Content duplication with other pages of the site (internal duplicate content);
5. Page content reading level; (?)
6. Page load time (many factors in here);
7. Page type (About-us page versus main content page);
8. Page internal popularity (how many internal links it has);
9. Page external popularity (how many external links it has relevant to other pages of this site);

Keywords usage and keyword prominence: 13 factors

1. Keywords in the title of a page;
2. Keywords in the beginning of page title;
3. Keywords in Alt tags;
4. Keywords in anchor text of internal links (internal anchor text);
5. Keywords in anchor text of outbound links (?);
6. Keywords in bold and italic text (?);
7. Keywords in the beginning of the body text;
8. Keywords in body text;
9. Keyword synonyms relating to theme of page/site;
10. Keywords in filenames;
11. Keywords in URL;
12. No “Randomness on purpose” (placing “keyword” in the domain, “keyword” in the filename, “keyword” starting the first word of the title, “keyword” in the first word of the first line of the description and keyword tag…)
13. The use (abuse) of keywords utilized in HTML comment tags

Outbound links: 8 factors

1. Number of outbound links (per domain);
2. Number of outbound links (per page);
3. Quality of pages the site links in;
4. Links to bad neighborhoods;
5. Relevancy of outbound links;
6. Links to 404 and other error pages.
7. Links to SEO agencies from clients site
8. Hot-linked images

Backlink profile: 21 factors

1. Relevancy of sites linking in;
2. Relevancy of pages linking in;
3. Quality of sites linking in;
4. Quality of web page linking in;
5. Backlinks within network of sites;
6. Co-citations (which sites have similar backlink sources);
7. Link profile diversity:
1. Anchor text diversity;
2. Different IP addresses of linking sites,
3. Geographical diversity,
4. Different TLDs,
5. Topical diversity,
6. Different types of linking sites (logs, directories, etc);
7. Diversity of link placements
8. Authority Link (CNN, BBC, etc) Per Inbound Link
9. Backlinks from bad neighborhoods (absence / presence of backlinks from flagged sites)
10. Reciprocal links ratio (relevant to the overall backlink profile);
11. Social media links ratio (links from social media sites versus overall backlink profile);
12. Backlinks trends and patterns (like sudden spikes or drops of backlink number)
13. Citations in Wikipedia and Dmoz;
14. Backlink profile historical records (ever caught for link buying/selling, etc);
15. Backlinks from social bookmarking sites.

Each Separate Backlink: 6 factors

1. Authority of TLD (.com versus .gov)
2. Authority of a domain linking in
3. Authority of a page linking in
4. Location of a link (footer, navigation, body text)
5. Anchor text of a link (and Alt tag of images linking)
6. Title attribute of a link (?)

Visitor Profile and Behavior: 6 factors

1. Number of visits;
2. Visitors’ demographics;
3. Bounce rate;
4. Visitors’ browsing habits (which other sites they tend to visit)
5. Visiting trends and patterns (like sudden spiked in incoming traffic)
6. How often the listing is clicked within the SERPs (relevant to other listings)

Penalties, Filters and Manipulation: 12 factors

1. Keyword over usage / Keyword stuffing;
2. Link buying flag
3. Link selling flag;
4. Spamming records (comment, forums, other link spam);
5. Cloaking;
6. Hidden Text;
7. Duplicate Content (external duplication)
8. History of past penalties for this domain
9. History of past penalties for this owner
10. History of past penalties for other properties of this owner (?)
11. Past hackers’ attacks records
12. 301 flags: double re-directs/re-direct loops, or re-directs ending in 404 error

More Factors (6):

1. Domain registration with Google Webmaster Tools;
2. Domain presence in Google News;
3. Domain presence in Google Blog Search;
4. Use of the domain in Google AdWords;
5. Use of the domain in Google Analytics;
6. Business name / brand name external mentions.











.

Great :thumbsup

Interesting info, thx for sharing! :)

Wow an actual post with relevant information about a topic everyone likes to bullshit about knowing. Good stuff. :thumbsup:thumbsup

I think Jill has a crush on that Bobby guy...just saying.... I heard they had a *THING* and that's why hes allowed to post. hehehe

Injustice!

Good read :)

Very nice my friend.

Good overview for peeps. :)

nice read bobby thanks

what about time spent on site - isnt that a considerable factor these days?

Yes, everything in your analytics is vital but more so for direct SEO.

Time spent on site
pages viewed
bounce rate
etc.




to the rest of the replies, ty all all for such great responses

She may have a Thing for me, but she keeps calling your name, i dont get it

great info.

GFy might be serious about the change.. Thanks for great BIZ thread.

Great article, and subsequent reply.

info-tastic.

Very informative and I am bookmarking this thread!

Good stuff bro, keep it coming. ;-)

great info there ..

hi, thx for the article, could you or someone else elaborate on the 3 keywords max rule? is that 3 uses per keyword max for an entire site? or per blog entry or??..

thx in advances!

Good question...

Your index meta Title, Keywords and Descriptions should only contain the same word a max of 3 times, ie Porn , Porn Videos, Porn Movies , once the Porn is used up, you can use the others a cpl more times like Adult Videos, Adult Movies, etc. While on this topic, google actually reads "single word coma single word coma" as a mixture of phrases, example below:

adult, porn, sex, movies, videos

the above can be read and related to Adult Porn, Adult Sex, Sex Movies, Sex Porn, Porn Videos, Adult Videos, Videos Sex, Adult Porn Movies, etc.

5 related keywords can generate a variety of phrases when spidered.

Your Title and Description is actually more effective when keywords are used 2 times instead of 3, and I as well as many others have seen more results from using your most important keyword with in the first few words.

(Bing is also starting to shift focuses on keyword placement and usage in your Title/Description and with in the past cpl months, URL)

As for blog posts - I assume your using All In One SEO or something similar which adds meta to each individual post. If this is the case, the google is going to index that page individually so once again, your able to use up to 3 on each post most related to your content. Google will not see these keywords while viewing the index of your blog, only when it follows the post and views the Single.php page. These pages are what i recommend you deep link to to not only increase your pages indexed faster, but to move them up in the SERPS for the keywords your going after.

nice, thank you again! thread bookmarked.

Good stuff 2bet

Good stuff, I enjoyed the read

educational post :thumbsup

bookmarked for future reference

domainage isnt a major factor ;)

awesome read, thank you very much :)

:hi thanks

Nice job.

cool, thanks

Oh shit Sleazy is fucked. He will never get his sites listed well in google :1orglaugh :winkwink:

Thanks for sharing the info. Very helpfull.


I have a question. I've assumed that google will detect how much traffic your site gets and will give more love to sites that get a lot of traffic. If the site gets 10 hits a day I assume they know this (as they know everything) and not index you well. How many hits a day do you think a site needs to not be penalized for not being popular.

If I buy some good relavent inbound links but don't get a good placement on those sites and in turn get little traffic from them. I am wondering how much traffic I should buy for the site and how good the quality should be (all US, or mix of traffic).

I ask because I am building 100's of sites and can't go balls to the wall with traffic on all of them. But I can buy more traffic to help make them appear more popular, in addition to what ever traffic I get from hard links.

Thanks.

Thanks for the great post!

nice - thanks

in regards to the whois info thing, do you think there is an advantage in keeping whois info private from an seo point of view? do you think that google looks at that info to find networks of sites belonging to one person? and thanks!!

If you're building a link farm (even on a small scale) then having a bunch of sites interlinked with the same whois info is not a good idea.

Excellent thread and posts. Bookmarked.
Thanks 2bet and marketsmart!

Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking, however, there are search engines who still do so it's a good idea not to abandon keywords, just don't spend too much time on it.

BTW cool article.

Great read Bobby thanks. I need to get with you so we can finish the stuff we chatted about a couple months ago. Just never enough hours in the day it seems.