Google celebrates 40 years of The Very Hungry Caterpillar
So let’s talk about Google. According to its site, “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
In 2000, I was on guest on the tech segment of TalkTV. Three guests were invited to talk about new sites and gadgets that emerged earlier in the year. I remember quite clearly that hands-down, everyone was the most excited about Google. Back then, information portals like WebMonkey, Yahoo, MSN dominated the search box, but users also had to endure a mess of other information that crowded the page.
Then along came Google.
The big portals were trying to employ usability standards, but Google blew them out of the water. Users of Google were treated to an interface where the mission was clear: enter some words in the search bar and click Search. Yeah, there was the standard now iconic company logo (charming in that it always changed with the seasons and holidays (see logo above)), but also very limited text links – maybe five on the page. The simplicity of the interface meant that it quickly and infectiously became the number one search engine and one of the top ranking sites on the Internet.
And well, the rest is history.
And well, so what?
Basically, this means that if you’re a person who is trying to make money online, it’s extremely important for you to rank as high as possible on Google. Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. According to Google, its speed is due in part to the efficiency of its search algorithm and in part to the thousands of low cost PC’s they’ve networked together to create a high-performance, extra fast search engine.
The heart of its software is called PageRank, a system for ranking web pages. 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 more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; 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.”
In other words, important, high-quality sites appear higher on search results pages (i.e. it has a higher PageRank). Google remembers a site’s ranking each time it conducts a search. But because high-ranking pages also have to be relevant to the person who’s entered the page, Google also combines PageRank with sophisticated techniques in matching text to identify 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 all 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. The full picture of the content is often referred to as its “aboutness”.
Yeah, but SO WHAT?
While Google has not revealed the details of their searching algorithm (after all, it’s their secret sauce), there is an entire industry and army of people who are trying to play by Google’s rules by legally stuffing their sites with as many search engine friendly terms as possible. So for a site publisher who is trying to make money online, one of the basic things he or she should do is try to ensure that the site has as high as a page rank as possible. In a few upcoming posts, I will be writing about a site’s link structure and the importance it plays in your PageRank. Some of the topics will include:
- Directory submission
- Internal Linking
- The importance of anchor links
- Title attributes in links
- “No Follow” links
- General suggestions for link building
Don’t worry. For newbies, these terms might be pretty foreign, but they’ll get you started on your quest to get your sites popping up higher in Google, as well as prime you in your search engine optimization knowledge (often plainly referred to as “SEO”). For more information, check out my other articles on SEO or simply go to Google itself and type in “SEO” in the Google search bar.
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