By: Jenna Ryan
The Marketing Shop.com
Google is essentially an organizer of websites. Much like the Dewey Decimal System is used to file library books by topic, Google indexes web pages by factors such as topic, popularity and keyword relevancy.
Googlebots: High Tech Librarians
Google sends its search engine crawlers, called Googlebots, to record and categorize every website within reach. Sites it cannot crawl are skipped over, while those it can read are indexed and ranked. When someone does a search on Google, the sites that pop-up are sites that were previously recorded to best match the keywords of the search.
Sites That Google Can't Crawl
Some websites are not indexable because the crawlers can't crawl the site. This serious problem can be blamed on a number of techncial issues such as:
A. Dirty Code that crawlers can't read.
B. No textual content for crawlers to record.
C. Frames that crawlers can't see.
D. Photos only pages that are invisible to crawlers.
E. Poorly built sites without a robots.txt file.
F. Websites with no textual navigation links.
The first step to making your website readable by Googlebot is to make sure it's built to be search engine friendly, addressing all the issues above.
How Webpages are Ranked & Categorized
Once a web page is read by the crawlers, the text of the page is recorded on Google's server and arranged according to its topic. Note, the only thing that Google records on its server is the text. It makes no use of photos, graphics, Flash or animation. Only the text is recorded and arranged by keyword topic. Sites are also ranked by other factors such as:
1. Age of your domain name
2. Webpage & Website Topic
3. Meta tags
4. Incoming links
5. Internal site links
6. Outgoing links
7. Website popularity
8. Content freshness
9. Topic consistency
10. Time frame of improvements
11. Domain address
12. IP Address
13. Keyword spamming
14. CTR - click-through-rates
15. Duplication of content
16. Page structure
17. Image alt tags
18. Paragraph headings
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Wow... a lot of food information. We have always wondered how Google ranks our website. Sometimes we are at the top of a search and the next day that very same search will have us on page 4. So #7 Website popularity... does that mean that the more places the have a hyperlink to your website the better?
Thanks!