Matt Cutts Explains How Google Crawls and Ranks Pages

[rustybrick]

Gary Price at the SEW blog covered First Issue Of Google's Newsletter For Librarians Released (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051219-173631) and points out that Matt Cutts wrote an article in that newsletter named How does Google collect and rank results? (http://www.google.com/newsletter/librarian/librarian_2005_12/article1.html)

Makes for an interesting read. I think I may send this one to some clients.

[Old Welsh Guy]

I have a couple of things like that which I send to clients. I have in the past (distant past), told a client that their site is now live, and within seconds received an email back telling me that they can't find it in the search engines. This was my reason for putting together my 'how things work' document.

I have found that it has saved me an awful lot of wasted time, and prevented unrealistic expectations for the client .

[pk_synths]

That's a good article. Not really mentioning anything that wasnt known but it was broken down nicely none the less.

[randfish]

Does make it sound far more simple than we in the biz are likely to see it, but it's a good pointer nonetheless.

[gemini]

Very simple explained - especially good for rookies. Also, gives some great ideas on relevance - makes me think about linking.

[pk_synths]

I think it's also important to note his explaination about how many times a word appears on a page. Suggests highlighting each occurance of the keyword and compare to other documents. Also him suggesting page headers was a surprise.

Keyword density and <h1> aren't dead as some thought :)

[Bruno]

about how many times a word appears on a page

yea, but this don't meens that they use keyword density formula :)

[seo-ireland]

Good basic information. A search engine really is an amazing system when you step back and think about it. Just imagine a world with no search engines and only DMOZ. Eeeeek!


Keyword density and <h1> aren't dead as some thought

Oh far from it. Link popularity is definitely still king of the roost though.

[gemini]

Sure it all comes to basics and the general idea. Of course if you zoom in, it will look complicated and if you zoom in even more it can be out of reach for most of us. Stick to the basics - "brilliantly simple". As for <h> tags - those are quite importand document structure tags and I don't think they will be disregarded just because of abuse - they might be handled differently, but the main idea will stay the same. Its human nature to abuse other's trust when no one sees.. and rules are made to be broken. Well, I'm not speaking for myself or others, I'm just saying it in general, so step back and squint your eyes ;)

[Darrin Ward]

It's nice to have it reiterated in basic language. Great read. I particularly liked the excercise for printing pages out and looking at them from a distance - I'm going to do that tomorrow in the office!!!

It would have been a super mega cool article if we had been told more about what various things it looks from that it considers "spam" or "over SEO", but obviously they won't be divulging that much info!

[Vermontwebmaster]

I agree that this is a good article to give to clients. Many clients do not understand and when you explain it they still do not understand.

[bobmutch]

Nothing new in the document for me. I don't think on-page factors have much ranking weight any way. It all about links.

This article is interesting to.
www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html (http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)

I like this diagram.
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/over.gif