Learn How Google Works In 30 Minutes or Less

I wrote this article that I posted on my blog, DealerInternet101.com:

This is my first algorithmic journey (I studied marketing and not math for good reason) and wanted to learn how Google’s PageRank worked in 30 Minutes or Less. I work with car dealerships everyday to educate them about how the Internet works so they can maximize their Internet marketing budgets. I’ve been explaining how search works in the same way for about 2 months and needed some new shiny tools for my search toolbox.

To start, I Googled ‘google’s algorithm’ because it seemed I a good place to start to discover how Google works (good idea, huh?) and found some interesting info. First, this is how Google refers to their Search Engine:

Google’s Technology: Google searches more sites more quickly, delivering the most relevant results.

At the heart of their technology is PageRank. Pagerank is a system for ranking web pages developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and is what fuels Google’s search engine. Larry Page and Sergey Brin built this engine while attending Stanford. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine is a college paper that has turned Google into a $171B company. I should have focused harder on my homework and hung out with smarter kids at school…

This is Google’s official explanation on PageRank:

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

PageRank shouldn’t be confused with Google’s PigeonRank, which involves multiple pigeons pecking at keyboards, day-and-night to power the Internet. Now THAT’S a great idea!!!

After finding this info, I checked out Wikipedia and got their usually reliable PageRank definition and checked out a few blog postings. I don’t know who Ian Rogers is, but I liked his explanation of how Google’s Algorithm works.

TIME’S UP!!!

PageRank isn’t as complicated as I thought it was going to be. It’s basically the connections that exist between any and all websites that Google is indexing. I use Google’s ’site:’ to show the number of pages Google has indexed for any URL when I’m explaining ‘How Google Works’ to the dealerships I interact with everyday.

Another tool that I’m going to start showing when demonstrating SEO is ‘link:’. This shows what websites Google has linking back to a URL, which plays a significant role in increasing PageRank for any website. It’s necessary that the link’s pointing back to your website are useful to your website’s visitors or Google will consider it SPAM. If Google thinks your URL is doing anything to game their mighty PageRank, they can blacklist your domain name. Can you say buh-bye visitors?

If you want to make sure the company you’re talking to is offering a quality SEO product, don’t take someone’s word for it, check out what Google suggests here.