How to optimize for Google

Most important for Google are three factors: Page Rank, link anchor text and semantics.

Page Rank is an absolute value which is regularly calculated by Google for each page it has in its index. Later in this course we will give you a detailed description, but for now it's just important to know that the number of links you've got from other sites outside your domain matters greatly, as well as the link quality. The latter means that in order to give you some weight, the sites linking to yours must themselves have high Page Rank, be content-rich and regularly updated.

MiniRank/Local Rank is a modification of the Page Rank based on the link structure of your single site only. Since search engines rank pages, not sites, certain pages of your site will rank higher for given keywords than others. Local Rank has a significant influence on the general Page Rank.

Anchor text is the text of the links that point to your pages. For instance, if someone links to you with the words "see this great website", this is a useless link. However, let's say you sell car tires and a link from another site to yours says "car tires from leading brands", such a link will boost your rank when someone searches for car tires on Google.

Semantics is a new factor that appears to have made the biggest difference to the results. This term refers to the meaning of words and their relationships. Google bought a company called Applied Semantics back in 2003 and has been using the technology for their AdSense contextual advertising program. According to the principles of applied semantics, the crawler attempts to define which words mean the same thing and which ones are always used together.

For example, if there are a certain number of pages in Google's index saying that an executive desk is a piece of office furniture, Google associates the two phrases. After this, a page about executive desks using the keywords "office furniture" won't show up in a search for the keywords ''executive desk". On the other hand, a page that mentions "executive desk" will rank better if it mentions "office furniture".

Now, there are two other terms related to Google's way of ranking pages: Hilltop and Sandbox.

Hilltop is an algorithm that was created in 1999. Basically, it looks at the relationship between "Expert" and "Authority" pages. An "Expert" is a page that links to lots of other relevant documents. An "Authority" is a page that has links pointing to it from the "Expert" pages.

In theory, Google would find "Expert" pages and then the pages that they link to would rank well. Pages on sites like Yahoo, DMOZ, college sites and library sites would be considered experts.

Sandbox refers to Google's algorithm which detects how old your page is and how long ago it has been updated. Usually pages with stale content tend to gradually slip down the result list, while new pages just crawled initially have higher positions than they would if based on Page Rank only. However, some time after gaining boosted positions, new website disappear from the top places in search results, since Google wants to verify whether your website is really continued and was not created with the sole purpose to benefit from artificially high rankings over the short term. The period when a website is unable to make it to the top of search results is referred to as "being in the sandbox". This can last from 6 months to one year, then the positions usually restore gradually. However, not all brand new site owners observe the sandbox effect on their own sites, which has led to discussions on whether the sandbox filter really exists.