Plain Inglish Guide to Google
People think that this whole Google search engine thing is vastly complex. Millions of eyes glaze over at the mention of reciprocal links, latent semantic indexing, keyword density and countless other bits of confusing jargon.
Behind all that stuff, it’s very simple – in the way that behind the exploded diagram of a Haynes manual the way that a combustion engine works is essentially simple: it explodes petrol and air and uses the force of those explosions to turn some wheels. Ok. Got that.
Google began as a programme for indexing online documents based their content, allowing it to retrieve those documents when a user typed in a search string that matched. Nothing too magical there; it’s what computers do best. But of the millions of documents that might match a search term, how does a computer decide which should appear first?
This is the problem – the opportunity – that Google seized and capitalised.
It was obvious to Google that online information had to have some kind of weighting or value – something that it doesn’t intrinsically have in digital form. Without that value, we can’t make sense of anything but more importantly, ‘the top of the Google search results’ doesn’t mean anything.
It also became clear that the more robust that weighting system was, the more valuable the first few pages of search results would become as online advertising real-estate.
Google quickly realised that there was two kinds of information: commercial (people selling goods and services) and non-commercial (people NOT selling goods and services). If Google could introduce a ‘value’ system to online information that worked for both kinds of information, it could make billions from commercial information (via pay per click advertising) at the same time as allowing non-commercial information to keep the same kinds of ‘value’ it had in the book-based world.
The way Google does this is to weigh up a page’s relevance to the search currently being done. If the page is judged highly relevant to that search, Google will put that page high up in the search results. This judgement of ‘relevance’ is itself complex and ever-changing (it has to be to counter people trying constantly to artificially engineer themselves to the top of Google) but in essence simple to understand.
Consider the world of online information just a world, like ours. Important information is judged as important for a whole number of reasons: how it’s ranked by respected institutions and expert individuals, how many people refer to it, how often it’s consulted, the context it’s set in and so on. Whatever Google builds in to its algorithms to determine ‘relevance’, rest assured that its purpose is to ensure that online information has a comparative value.
Why? Because a browser is only so big and can only display 10 ‘natural’ results and 10 ‘pay per click’ results on one page. That first two or three pages is only valuable real-estate for Google so long as it remains in control of the underlying value system that orders online information.
99% of what you read and hear about Google with all its accompanying jargon is spoken by people trying to engineer their way to the first two or three pages of either the natural or the paid search engine results.
Google itself has very little to say because – apart from what I’ve outlined above – there is very little else to say. Google is far less mysterious and complex than people think but it’s no less profound and powerful for that.
All of the above points to the fact that, so long as Google exists there will only be two ways to get to the top of Google.
1) For free - in the ‘natural’ search results (by creating fresh, keyword-rich, semantically-relevant, regularly-updated, peer-approved content)
2) By paying – in the ‘sponsored’ or ‘pay-per-click’ search results (also governed by how popular and relevant your ads are considered to be)
That other 99% of Google chatter would have you believe that there are other ways, means, products or services to get you to the top of Google. There aren’t. There’s only the above two ways or there’s spam.
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