CHAPTER 1: SEARCH ENGINES AND HOW THEY WORK
- Where would the online community be without search engines? Search engines have become the sole source of
organized information on the worldwide web. Visitors seeking information, products, or services go straight to
their search engine of choice and expect to find exactly what they are looking for. Search engine companies
know this and make it their priority to optimize their search results with the best results for each query.
Can you imagine what it would be like without the search engines? Visitors would need to memorize and bookmark the URLs of the web sites they found through printed sources or word of mouth.
Search engines exist to bring all types of information to the entire world. The search engines’ main goal is to collect any and all pertinent information found in web sites, organize it, and make it easily accessible to millions of people.
Search engines now use a system of robots to scan (“crawl”) entire web pages, including the meta tags and titles, because of the enormous volume of web sites in existence today. With the data collected from each web page, they score, index, and rank the web sites.
Search engines find out about a new web site through clicking on a link to it from another web site or when it is submitted to them for approval into their database.
The ranking system is performed with the use of algorithms, a set of rules that search engines use to evaluate a web site in determining its relevancy to a particular search.
Each major search engine uses its own methods and rules to produce search results, although most of the principles discussed in this book will always be necessary for web sites to have.
GOOGLE’S SANDBOX
Google is practically the most popular search engine on the web today. Most web site owners hire SEO companies to improve their listings in Google, since they know it is widely used. Yet it is important to know about the existence of “Google’s sandbox,” which applies to new web domains.
The Google sandbox method is used to place newly added web sites into a “sandbox” to evaluate them for an extensive period of time, during which the web sites receive poor ranking, although they are optimized properly.
When Google releases the web site from its sandbox, the web site can finally rank for popular keywords matching the data on its web site, as long as the web site is optimized properly. Generally speaking, it may take new web sites up to six to eight months to be able to achieve top rankings in Google results.
It may be frustrating, yet Google does this to analyze the web site during this time and make sure that it is a reputable site, with accurate and helpful information.
If you’ve owned a domain for a long period of time, you should not purchase a new one if the old one has a suitable name. The reason you should keep your older domain is because it will not be held in the sandbox for longer than a couple of months, even if you change the entire theme and design of the web site.
When a new domain is purchased, Google places it in the sandbox for about two to three months, regardless of how well it is written and designed.
There are some in the SEO industry that believe you should use a descriptive domain that matches your business or includes a keyword about your web site. I disagree with this notion and believe that the actual domain has little impact on your rankings. The age of the domain name, however, is significant.
If you are interested in researching this topic further, you can perform searches for different topics and note the domain names of the top-ranking web sites. You will notice how many of the highly ranked web sites don’t have a domain that matches the query.
In the following chapters, I will reveal all the tactics you need to use to achieve top rankings, gain more visibility, and increase visitors. You must follow each step in this book to achieve top rankings.