What is algorithm?
Algorithm can be a set of procedures to finish one task. Algorithm is usually used prevalent in fields like Mathematics and Computer Science. However, algorithm can also exist in the daily life, like steps to make a cake. For me, going to a trip for fall break also involved a lot of steps of decision makings. Algorithm for Google to rank web pages will be more complex and difficult than the daily life algorithm.
What is Google algorithm?
Google algorithm is called PageRank. PageRank is named after Larry Page, the co-founder of Google. PageRank works like algorithms in Mathematics, Computer Science, and daily algorithm ranks the search results based on queries imputed in the search query box by users. However, the algorithm made by Google is way more complex than most other algorithms. Therefore, only few people in this world who work for Google know the exactly algorithm, ranking the search results. Google algorithm will only work for organic search, not for paid search. For Google, its mission is to provide its users most relevant and best search results. In order to meet the goal, providing most relevant and best search results is really important for Google. PageRank makes the goal possible by changing and improving the algorithms frequently. More and more individuals are willing to use Google as their primary search engine.
Why knowing Google algorithm is important?
In the U.S, Google owns a large amount of market share of search engines. Market share owned by Google is about 67.3%, followed by Bing and Yahoo 19.4%, 10%, respectively. Therefore, in the United States, anyone who works for search engine marketing, ignoring Google will lose a lot of opportunities. Knowing how Google ranks the web pages is really critical for search engine optimization practitioners to improve their works. You will know where the goals are, and you can follow the algorithm to reach the goals. With knowing how Google ranks the web pages, practitioners have a higher possibility to optimize their web pages to show in the first page of search results. Because Google algorithm frequently upgrades practitioners should follow the information and make adjustments of their web pages.
What key factors do Google algorithm value?
Relevance, authority, and trust are few factors that used by Google algorithm to rank the search results among all web pages. For relevance, Google algorithm needs to find out web pages which are related with users’ search queries. This process is also called crawling. If the web pages have nothing to do with the queries, Google algorithm will not consider them at all. Authority and trust are more about finding high quality web pages which are linked by many other high-quality web pages. Spider is the automated robot that works to scan the contents and links in each web pages, and it will decide how web pages will be ranked.
Summary
There are many times that the search results still can not provide users the web pages that they want because Google search engine cannot guess correctly users’ intent. Therefore, knowing users’ intent is also really hard for search engines. Following the updating algorithm made by any search engines is one of the essential tips that search engine optimization practitioners should pay attention on.
By Ting Xiao