How Do Search Engines Rank Pages In The Results

The number and complexity of differing criteria for measuring a pages right to be listed on the first page include

1. The content on the page including the Words being searched for .


2. Is the content Unique ( Does Search Engine have the exact same paragraphs in store already ) from your site or did somebody else publish it first


3. Semantics difficult to explain but if your page was about cars the search engine might expect to find words like driving or engine within the content


4. The Title, Meta Description, Words in Bold / Strong and Headings


5. Age Of Domain


6. The Quality of the sites that link to you ( Often Called Authority or Trusted Sites )


7. The Quality of the sites that the page links out to for example a page about green cars suddenly has links out to little blue pills would quickly be picked up as BAD but a link to Ford Motor Company would be considered a good thing and may even gain you additional ranking points


8. Other Links pointing to that page ( your own and from other web
   sites )


9. The text used in the links pointing to the page for example a link saying click here may well have a lower value than a link that says blue cars if the search query was blue cars ( This was the Loophole that SEO'S and SEM's used for a long while ) and Google were forced to combat , it is also the way Google Bombs were implemented against well known people in the public eye


10. The Page Rank of your Site / Page ** What many call the little green bar ( This was much more important 2 years ago but is decreasing in importance all the time ) partly due to Google using more manual checking and also because it was very heavy manipulated by SEO'S through buying links and every other trick in the book and many not in books


11. Over Optimization Filter


12. How sticky the site is ( I.E. how long do visitors stay )


13. Suspected Google may even be collecting further information like did the visitor to Favorites


14. Google and the other Search Engines also employ a significant number of quality control staff ( possibly as many as 10,000 ) to weed out sites they believe should not be included
    


15. It is also thought to depend on how competitive the search term is ( Believed to be derived from PPC prices but pure subjecture ) Search Engines may put in additional layers of checking for example they may well place a much higher on reliance on age of site / page and age of the links into that page i.e. 1,000 links in that were all just 1 month old could be fully discounted


16. I will include one further thing of interest all of the search engines do ban websites / Domains / Blogs and even if the site is now squeeky clean and perfectly optimized for a search term your out of luck ( You can apply to all search engines for re inclusion )


17. As you can tell there are so many things but one of the most important IS AGE OF BLOG / DOMAIN / PAGE and Google will often give new sites a honeymoon period to help them gain natural links and visitors and after the honeymoon which can last from 2 days to 3 months the new site will struggle against older more established sites which is why if you do not get traffic do not give up , depending on how competitive the sector you are trying to enter will depend on how long before you gain free traffic

One further note when you do first start to gain free traffic from Search Engines it will be on the longer tail keywords for example you may hope to be found for Blue Cars but if your page talks about Fords or a Blue Honda Prelude Car you mind find visitors coming through for Blue Honda Prelude Car , as your page gets older and gains more links providing all other things are equal you will slowly rise for your chosen keyword of "Blue Cars" from page 75 or 750'th in the results upwards closer to that magical 1st 10 results.


These are only a small subset of the algo that is used to rank pages and the priority of any one of those and many more can be changed at any time and often are . Google .

It should also be noted that Google in particular was pretty pi???? when they realized how easily the SEO'S were manipulating their results and have slapped a number of sites by taking away the visible Page Rank from sites known to be buying and selling links in order to manipulate results , as yet it looks like all they have done is taken away the green that used to be on those sites without penalizing them in the rankings ( but I also suspect that if they feel they are losing the battle they may well take their rankings as well ) only time will tell .

Some Further Suggested Reading

How Many Words In Post Compared With Total On Page

Links In Links Out What Is Good or Bad ?

From those two posts you realize that depending on the percentage of unique content from that post and the number of links out from the page will define if Google Indexes and places into it's d-base to be found. ( there are many other issues on where it is found in the Search Results 1st or 950th Covered slightly in these two posts


Tuning Your Blog For Search results