Google search

A step by step guide to finding out how well your site is being treated by the Google search engine.

Definitions

Search engines are companies that try to keep up with the ever expanding content of the internet and deliver to us a useful index of what is there. Eg Google

Spiders/Crawlers/Bots are the software programmes that search engines send out to explore the internet and report back all the new content that they find. eg Googlebot

Directories are lists of links and descriptions structured according to specific interest categories.

We are concentrating on Google as it the currently most used search engine in the world.

What is your ranking?

• The ranking Google assigns to you website is very important in determining how much traffic it will receive.
• It will control the frequency with which their search engine spider updates its record of your site, and it plays some role in determining where your entry will appear in a search result.
• The easiest way to see your ranking is to install the Google toolbar in your browser and activate the ‘rank’ option.
• The rank is a number between 0 and 10. Anything less than 4 is pretty poor. 4 to 6 are normal results for a site with good content.
• The single biggest determinant of your ranking will be the number of other sites that link to your site (this is the concept that Google invented and which made their search engine unique). These should preferably be other sites with a high Some directories, will deliver a beneficial effect (if you register your site in the right place) because of the high ranking that they get for their category pages and because they are widely syndicated to other search engines.

How many pages of your site have been indexed by Google?

Google cannot link to a page on your site if it hasn’t indexed it, so it is a good idea to check up on how Google is seeing the site.

• If I want to look at our site www.newsstand.co.uk which contains details of thousands of British magazines for which we sell subscriptions, I type ‘allinurl:www.newsstand.co.uk site:www.newsstand.co.uk’ into the Google search box. It immediately tells me that Google has indexed 3,870 pages of the site. If I then click on the ‘repeat the search with the omitted results included .’ link, it will list for me each of those pages.
• Why is this important? If I can see that Google has indexed the page of a specific magazine title, and the site has a good ranking, then I have a good chance of our site being returned by Google if you make a Google query for that In this example, we are getting people who have typed a magazine title into Google coming directly to our site, and to the page on our site that is offering a subscription for that particular magazine (not just to the home page).
• If you can see it, you can do something about it!

How many sites are linking to your site?

This is pretty important as it influences how high your ranking is, so you had better be able to see who is linking to you. The Google query ‘allinurl:www.newsstand.co.uk’ will return a list of all the sites that mention www.newsstand.co.uk. A total of about 4,540 which includes all those that are references to itself.  So that would imply 4,540 – 3,870 = 670 external links, which would be pretty good! But if you use the Google query ‘link:www.newsstand.co.uk’ it only returns a list of 57 links.
The difference between these two results is that one measures the number of ‘qualifying’ links that the Google spider will find and follow to your website, and the other is measuring the number of times that the URL of the site is mentioned on the internet. The former is the most important for Google ranking and while there was a time that the ‘qualification’ that Google imposed was relatively simple (eg it only counted links from websites that have a ranking of 4 or over), however they now seem now to be using a more complex system, no doubt designed to prevent manipulation of their ranking.  

I will write a separate article on what you can do once you have got a reasonable analysis of how your website is being indexed.  But that will have to wait until later.  If you have an immediate requirement, then please contact us to see how we can help.