New Google Algorithms Explained

There are various approaches to Search Engine Optimization. However, two distinct schools of thought have arisen over the last few years. The school of “Content is King” claims that content is the most important element in SEO. The school of “Links are King”, on the other hand, claim that inbound links are the best way to get top rankings. I believe that the new Google algorithms may draw together these two schools of SEO thought.

A word about Google before we go on. I will use the term search engine and Google interchangeably through out this article. I know there are other search engines, but Google still has approximately 80% of the search engine traffic and is really the major target of most SEO.

What we know for sure:
The reason there is so much fierce debate between these two camps is that the search engines will never reveal their formulas for ranking web site in their search results. Debate tends to be supported by empirical evidence at best, and a fairly high degree of speculation. What we do know for certain is the following.

Content:
If you build a web site on which the content is very unique Google will rank that site in the SERPs on the basis of the content. This is a combination of the words found in either the title, the on page headings, and the body of the text. This fact was recently demonstrated in an experiment done by Mel Nelson and reported on WebProWorld.

What Mel’s experiment indicates is that, for pages in unique niche markets, the content of the web site may be adequate to obtain a good ranking in Google’s search results. The people who work on pages of this type maintain that content got them their ranking and that content is the only really important element in SEO success.

This is an interesting claim in regard to Google because Google was built upon the founders use of PageRank. PageRank assumes that incoming links are a type of vote for the importance and relevance of the page. Google originally used or placed a great deal of importance on inbound links in ranking pages for position in their SERPs. In fact, Google will not keep a site in its index unless there is at least one inbound link.

Despite this the “content is king” school persists, and is characterized by a thought or claim that anyone who participates in aggressive link building is slightly suspect or is in some way cheating the system.

Linking:
We also know that it is possible, through aggressive link building campaigns, to have a site rank very high in the SERPs for search terms or keyword phrases that do not appear anywhere on the page. In the past, this was achieved by using the keyword phrases in the anchor text of the link.

Anchor text, for the uninitiated, is the actual text phrase that you would click on to follow the link. “Click here” was the commonly used for anchor text in the past. Today, you can almost tell whether a site has been optimized by the absence of “click here” used in links.

The “links are king” camp maintains that content is relatively unimportant to the ranking of a site. Unfortunately, this is often interpreted as saying that there should be no effort or thought given to content. While this may be true for pure SEO achievement, even the “links are king” advocates acknowledge that once visitors arrive on the site they must find what they are looking for or the site will not be successful. However, to get people to the site via the search engines, content is not important for sites in highly competitive market segments who wish to rank well for popular search terms.

Content should be written as completely and as carefully as possible, but for competitive search terms, it is not what will get a site a top ranking in the SERPs.

How the new Google may reconcile these two camps:
Google made some dramatic changes in the ranking of sites in their search results on or about November 16, 2003. This change is commonly known as the Florida update. There have been a few more adjustments or updates since then, but things are definitely different now than they were before November 16th.

Nobody knows for sure what changes Google has made. Google watchers know that, over the past year or so, Google has bought companies and register patents for a variety of technologies that are involved with semantic analysis. It is believed that they are attempting to do a much more in-depth analysis of the relevance and of the content of the page from which the inbound link is coming.

In the past, PageRank was simply a mathematical calculation based on the PageRank of all the pages linking to each other or sharing links. The original assumption, no doubt, was that people would only link to and from pages with similar or complementary information, or in other words relevant information. As the value of links, or backlinks as inbound links are known, became evident, people started to engage in linking to non related sites.

Google’s first attempt to judge the relevance of any inbound link appeared to be by reading the anchor text. If the anchor text said “viagra information”, it was assumed that the page it pointed to must be relevant for viagra information. The more links with that anchor text, the more relevant the page must be.

The problem with that system is that it is open to a certain amount of spamming. It is now thought that Google is using some combination of Local Rank, Applied Semantics, Topic Sensitive PageRank, Hilltop or Stemming to attempt to more precisely measure the relevance of an inbound link. These tools or technology would all do some degree of content analysis of the page containing the link. This analysis would determine if the page was relevant, or topically related, to the content or information on the page to which it is linking.

The connection:
If what has been said in the section above is true, suddenly content has a new importance in the ranking of a page. Now it is not so much the content on your own page that will get you ranked in the SERPs, but the content on the pages from which your links are coming. All interconnected pages are now giving each other a relevance boost. In addition to the mathematical PageRank boost, it suddenly becomes important that all interconnecting pages have relevant or related content.

So we may have come full circle. Links are what will get your page ranked highly in the SERPs. But content is what will give your backlinks their ultimate ranking value.

And that is what the webmaster world needs to be prepared for.