October 18 2006

The Google Algorithm - reverse-engineered?

Understanding how Google ranks pages is the holy grail of search marketing, and today Rand at SEOmoz has published his view on this: a combination of experience and reverse engineering. There are over 200 factors that combine to give the weighting, but this view is a great aid memoire in planning one's page design, text and linking strategy.

Chris Lake at e-consultancy spotted the post on SEOmoz, so thanks for the lead.

Looking through the list it's clear that many of these points now established best practice (name in title and head, quality of the text itself), the location of the domain on the web (history, established and historic links, the "topical neighbourhood") and of course the inbound links (age, quality, anchor text etc).

While there's still plenty of scope of SEO practicioners, the message for etailers is to address the best-practice basics as a matter of course and to fully own the material published on our websites.

Ian Jindal