Relevance



In 1994, Yahoo was the only game in town. It was the optimal directory, listing 25,000 sites. However, as a search engine, it rarely delivered satisfactory results. A typical search generated a long list of pages devoid of relevance-based ranking, so you often had to sift through pages of useless websites.
 

Theory of Relevance

Five years later, Google changed everything. It began ranking websites according to importance. The more times a website linked to another site, the more important it became and the higher it ranked.

Google encapsulated this concept in a formula. Not only does it count the links pointing to the site, but it also factors in the importance of the site doing the linking. This calculation generates a value between 0 and 10 for each webpage, which is known as Google’s “Page Rank.” The higher a site’s Page Rank, the better it lists on Google.

All in all, Page Rank resulted in Google consistently delivering more relevant results for all searches.

The effect was profound. Searches now produced a list of sites with significantly higher degrees of relevance. Page Rank left other search engines like Excite and Yahoo scrambling to catch up as surfers turned to Google for superior search results.

Thus, if Google ranked your site well, you benefited from all the traffic they sent your way. Webmasters now had to appease Google and its guidelines—or be banned and get no traffic at all.

Users’ behavior also changed. Instead of browsing pages of results, users often clicked on the first few sites listed. In fact, research shows that 27 percent of all clicks on search results are on the first site listed and 19 percent on the second.

SEOs: Rank #1 Guaranteed!

Unfortunately, there is also the dark side of this equation, the unintended consequence of Google’s new ranking system: the birth of the search engine optimizer (SEO)—the digital world’s equivalent of a snake-oil salesman, an individual who promises to rank your site number one! He analyzes your site (more keywords!) and the links pointing to it (you need more!). Think Y2K consultants, only with better software.

The SEO claims to have somehow divined the secrets of search engines and will, for a price, share them with you. But take note: there are some obstacles for SEOs to surmount.

1) Google protects the details of its formula like Coke protects its recipe. Since no one at Google is talking, this leaves the SEO to something we call reverse engineering . . . or guessing!

2) Google readily informs everyone how to be well ranked on its site. Google wants to produce relevant search results. It happily enumerates the basic steps to create a site that will list well in its search results. It does not, however, want to enable SEOs to introduce unimportant sites to its results. Therefore, Google will tell you directly how optimize your site.


Google Rules!

Here is a truncated version of Google’s guidelines:

Design and Content Guidelines

• Create a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important areas of the site.
• Produce a useful, information-rich site. Clearly & accurately describe your content.
• Think about the search words that users would enter to find your pages, and include these words within the site.
• Use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
• Insure that your TITLE tag describes each page uniquely.
• Have other relevant sites link to yours.

Quality Guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
• Don’t create multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with duplicate content.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines.