How Google Ranking Algorithm Works in 2013

While the companies are busy finding the ‘secret’ for 2013, Google comes up with further modified algorithms that are meant to eradicate black hat techniques, so as to provide more meaningful search engine results.

Google employs the use of Page Rank algorithm to rank websites in the Google search engine. Google’s Page Rank algorithm works by calculating the weight and value of a page in terms of contents’ quality (relevance) and the power of the page (importance) in general.

When you enter a search query on Google search, the web portal looks for a site that is more relevant and important.  PageRank algorithm ranks website for each page individually. The pages following such a ranked page contribute to the ranking of whole document.

Factors of Google’s Ranking Algorithm

Every business website, whether small or large, needs to know major factors of Google’s ranking algorithm and how Google decides on when and where to rank a certain webpage. Here every steps described below:

Trust/Authority of your Domain

Trust and authority of the host Domain is the most important factor in the Google’s ranking algorithm.  Google uses Domain Authority to calculate domain trust so as to rank your site higher in SERPs. Domain authority calculates the number of quality links to your website domain and also finds the approach of doing so. Sometimes having a strong domain authority and trust can get your useless or unimportant page rank higher; giving you a competitive edge over other, low authority websites, who might be trying hard to achieve the same level. This shows why hub pages are ranked higher in Google search.

Link Popularity of the page

Link popularity implies the number and the quality of links on a website; which means that a page is ranked higher by Google if there are more links to it, BUT of quality. The idea of increased link popularity is to get a lot of inbound links from popular and authoritative sites whose content is relevant to yours and has a good reputation. From Google’s perspective, such a site gets extra rankings. In other words, Google looks at the number of inbound links to your website and the importance of those websites that are linked to yours. Having irrelevant or useless links can cost you a lot though.

Rich Anchor text of external links to the page

The objective of Google is to provide relevant search engine results and this is where anchor text comes to use. Anchor text or link text is a clickable, hyperlink text that contains words relevant to your web page. The anchor text that contains relevant keywords represents that the site contains highly relevant content to the search query. Therefore, such a site is ranked higher in Google’s ranking algorithm.

On-page Keyword usage

Keyword refers to the words or phrase a user enters in his search for a website. Google uses the keyword criteria to optimize a website for search engine results and attain increased Google ranking. The best way to do so, is to optimize the website by increasing the number of times a keyword search for, appears on your website. This does not mean that you perform keyword stuffing and make your content illegible. Search engine regard such a site as SPAM. So, to play it safe and cover all aspects of keyword optimization, start with a keyword density of 1-2.5% and restrict the number of keywords you use on a webpage. Other than using keywords in the content, adding them in the title, headings, URL, description and anchor text for inbound links can rank your website higher.

Registration and Hosting information

The Domain registration history, hosting uptime of server, Hosting information such as the domains hosted on the server, information regarding how a document is hosted within a computer network, the length of a domain registration (one year or 10 years) and the stability of the host company and the hosting data (downtime of a site, bandwidth etc), and other factors are recorded by Google so as to facilitate better ranking of a website. For example, a website that has a domain registration as old as 10 years will be ranked higher by Google because Spammers most likely do not register for more than a year.

Traffic and Click-through data(CTD)

Many companies use competitive keyword terms in their website content, lending them ranks between 2 to 5. But the issue is when the information put in them is not relevant to their target market; impelling people to go back and search again, for better results. Such a mistake can quickly reduce your website’s ranking, even if you take extra care on meeting the other requirements of optimal search engine results. You need to drive quality traffic through quality content, so as to minimize the bounce rate of your website.

Social Aspects and Standards

With the popular use of Social media all over the internet, Google has slowly started to acknowledge websites that are able to attract traffic to their content through various activities on social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook etc.