This article is about how Google ranks websites. A lot of what I have learned about Google is from my own experiences of manipulating keywords in Google, and also from reading other SEO experts on Google. Realize no one knows all the complexities of the google algorithms, but one can make educated guesses on what is most likely to be the case based on trial and error. Google has 90% of the internet searchers so like Google or not, you will want to cater to them if you want to stay ahead of your competitors.

The first thing people need to realize is, Google is pretty smart. It is constantly updating it’s algorithms to get even smarter at weeding out garbage content or “black hat” SEO techniques. Google can easily decipher a junk article from a quality article. In other words, Google will spell check your article, check for broken up paragraphs, repeat words, keyword density, and even plagiarism from other internet sources. If your articles are poorly written in structure, spelling, or grammar, or stolen content, Google will easily know it.

It is important you write quality proper english articles if you want it to rank higher in Google. Google knows a lot of poor or spam sites are put together in a hurry and poorly written or just copied from some other site. It is not an exact science of course, but Google knows that well written and long original content is more likely to be worth a high rank in the search engine.

So now that you realize that Google is a lot smarter then you think it is, let’s get into some other factors that effect your ranking in Google.

Google and PR:

Your Google Pagerank is a huge importance on how high you rank in the search engines. Not only by your front main page, but for any individual page. For blogs, your most recent posts tend to have the most PR due to the hierarchy structure, so as posts get buried they tend to lose rank in the SERPS. This is important because it was something I didn’t know when I first started blogging and it puzzled me to find out old blog posts and forum threads lost their rank, until i figured out it was because they were losing their PR. As soon as I put them at the top again or linked them from the front page, they regained their SERP positions. I’ve heard some SEO “experts” call it a honeymoon period, but that is not true because no matter how old the post is, if you get it a good link from your main page (which usually has all your PR juice) it will regain its rank again.

If your competing against a lot of high Pagerank sites you will be struggling to get search engine hits. Some websites don’t have to compete as hard with other sites on PR. For example Dollars Blog is competing with a highly competitive market as people on SEO, Webmaster, Blogging topics know a lot about SEO and Pagerank.

The google toolbar PR number is good indicator of progress, but keep in mind that PR is constantly being calculated by google. The toolbar is showing a delayed calculation sometimes by a few months. So, the major google update every few months isn’t going to change your current ranking in the search engines as that is constantly being updated.

I believe the consensus is that the Google PR number is used by Google to tell how often Google should spider your content and show new content.

Google and Duplicate Content:

If you think you are going to get away with plagiarizing other people’s work in order to get around having to write quality original content, think again. Google will put a duplicate page found elsewhere on the net in the supplemental index (so you won’t see it on a search). Google seems to probably measure to what degree it’s been duplicated. In other words, if it’s a exact copy then it will probably be supplementaled. If there is some strong similarities, it might get a poorer ranking, but still show up in Google.

How Google Reads Title:

Title’s are extremely important with Google. Keywords in the beginning of the title are more important at the end. You also don’t want to have too many keywords in your title and just focus on what you want searchers to narrow in on. Too many words in your title will dilute the entire strength of your title.

Too many words dilutes the power of the title overall. Google compares the keyword phrase the search engine user wants to the keywords in the title and docks off points for “extra keywords” outside the searched phrase. The same keyword or keyword phrase shown twice in the title will hurt you in ranking because it will be seen as extra keywords and dilute the power of your title.

How Google Reads URL:

Based on my experience, I would say keywords in URL are probably now read by Google as even more important than titles. Google realizes probably that title’s are easier to manipulate than URL’s, so as a result has probably put more focus on them recently. Just keep in mind that hyphens seperating the keywords in your url(including domains) are supposedly seen better by Google.

Google and Domain Registration:

In a recent patent by Google they discussed domain registration. They basically implied that in the future they will be giving more weight to longer registered domains. Their reasoning was that spam sites hardly ever register for more then a year out. If your domain is important to you, I would recommend registering it out for 10 years.

Google and Site Age:

Google ranks websites not only by how long the domain has been registered, but also how long it has been indexed in Google. Having a domain that was parked for 10 years and not in Google won’t be as valuable as a google indexed site. Your rankings in Google will go up dramatically over the years according to some people based on both the domain age and the google indexed age.

Google is smart to the trick of people parking domains for later use. So, if you plan on parking your domain for 5 years, it won’t hold that much weight when you do decide to start hosting it as a real website. How long it’s been indexed in Google is more important then how old is the domain.

Google also monitors whois changes for people who transfer domain ownership. If the content of your site does not change it should have little/no effect when you change the whois information on your domain. If you change the whois and your website radically changes, Google may see this as a new website owner and you may lose a lot of the hard earned rankings it took you months/years to get.

Link Velocity:

The growth of your backlinks plays a big role in your rankings. Getting too many too soon can get you sandboxed. If your site has a high PR but suddenly stops getting backlinks, you could lose your search engine rankings to a site that has much lower PR, but is getting a steady amount of new backlinks everyday. I have seen some prominent bloggers claim that link velocity is what got them higher rankings than sites with a higher PR. This would make sense to me, as Google sees incoming link growth as a sign of a site with constant fresh and valuable content. Remember, slow and steady, is better than streaky backlink building.

Other Factors in Google Ranking:

There is dozens of other factors that go into Google rankings according to Google. In this article we hit on some of the major factors.