How does Google rank pages?

Knowing how Google rank pages will save you lot of time and effort while designing your web pages .

Search Engine Tips
By Google.

1. The basics

Google's order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including our PageRank algorithm. Please check out our "Why Use Google" page for more details. Due to the nature of our business and our interest in protecting the integrity of our search results, this is the only information we make available to the public about our ranking system.

2. Why does my page's rank keep changing?

We update our index every four weeks. Each time we update our database of web pages, our index invariably shifts: We find new sites, we lose some sites, and sites ranking may change. Your rank naturally will be affected by changes in the ranking of other sites. You can be assured that no one at Google has hand adjusted the results to boost the ranking of a site. Google's order of results is automatically determined by several factors, including our PageRank algorithm. Please check out our "Why Use Google" page for more information on how this works.

You may want to check and see if the number of other sites linking to your URL has changed. This is the single biggest factor in determining what sites are indexed by Google, as we find most pages when our robots crawl the web and jump from page to page via hyperlinks. To find out who links to your site, use Google's link: tool.

3. Why is my ranking different in Google than in Yahoo!?

Although Google powers Yahoo's search, our two sites are not identical in how we handle user queries. Thus, you may not get exactly the same results when you search using Google.com and Yahoo!. This is not an error on the part of either engine but merely reflects differences in the frequency with which the sites are updated and the number of pages in the index each uses to generate results.

In both cases we try to provide the best possible search experience for users, which means we do not sell results or force placement of one site above another. The basic search algorithm used is exactly the same.

4. I'm changing my URL. How can I maintain my rank?

Regrettably, we cannot manually change your listed address at the same time you move to your new site.

That said, there are steps you can take to make sure your transition is a smooth one. Google listings are based in part on our ability to find you from links on other sites. To preserve your rank, you will want to inform others who link to you of your change of address. One way to find out who is linking to you is to try a link search. Enter "link:[your full URL]" into the Google search box. You may not find every page that links to you with this method, but it should help you begin redirecting the links leading to your site. (Please note: we do not serve link queries for all of the sites in our index, so this may not produce any results for your site.) Once your new site is live, you may wish to place a permanent redirect (using a "301" code in HTTP headers) on your old site to inform visitors and search engines that your site has moved.

Finally, if your site goes unlisted for a time, this does not mean you were dropped from our index. Sometimes, in these transitions, we will fail to find a site at its new address. Just be sure that others are linking to you and we should pick you up on our next web crawl.
Source=http://www.internet-webmarketing.com/articles/how-google-ranks-pages.html

More This article discusses how Google rank pages in order of relevance and importance. It is not a secret or sure formula that guarantees good ranking. However, understanding how one of the most popular search engines rank pages will help you to strategize your web pages to rank well. Ranking well on Google need not be a shot in the dark exercise. All you need is to understand Google's scoring system and work on your web pages accordingly.

When someone performs a search query, Google needs to do 2 things before it presents the results according to ranking. Firstly, it finds the pages that contain the search query term and ranks them in order of relevance. Secondly, it determines the importance of each page. The final ranking results are combinations of relevance and importance. Remember the 2 keywords relevance and importance, which form the heart of Google's scoring system.

Relevance

How does Google define relevance and rank pages for a particular search query? Well, if someone do a search query on internet marketing, Google will look up its index for pages containing the words internet and marketing. Web pages' relevance will be ranked accordingly to the following criteria...

1.Pages that contain the 2 words internet and marketing will rank higher than those that only contain either one of two words.
2.Pages that contain the 2 words internet and marketing right next to one another and discuss internet marketing will be deemed more relevant than pages that discuss marketing in general and only mentioning internet marketing in passing.
3.Page titles that contain Internet Marketing will give Google a hint that they are more relevant than others.
4.Also a page that contains the term internet marketing several times is likely to be more relevant than a page that contains the term once. (However, do not overstaff your web page with your targeted keywords or else you may be penalized for keyword spamming.)

Google uses your page titles, and content to determine the relevance of your web pages for your targeted key phrases.

Importance

After having retrieved pages from its index that contain the search query, Google will now determine the importance of the web pages through its Pagerank algorithm. Pagerank basically evaluates 2 things: The quantity of links to web page from other web pages, and quality of the web pages from which the links originated.

These two factors, quantity and quality determine the importance of a web page. With Pagerank, emphasis is placed on quality over quantity. Four or five quality links from websites like adobe.com or cnn.com would be valued more highly than twice as many links from less reputable websites. And of course, a web page with a lot of quality links will boost its importance significantly.

As a rule of thumb, Google uses relevance and importance to rank pages. It will find pages that are relevant and reputable. If two pages contain the same amount of information that matches a search query, it will give a higher ranking to the page that has more quality links. Still Google has given higher ranking to a page with fewer links or lower Pagerank because of its onpage factors - page title and content. For example a page that focused on 'internet marketing' is more useful than a page in a reputable site like cnn.com that only mentions 'internet marketing' in brief.

Once Google has consolidated a list of web pages with their scores, it will select those with the highest scores as the best matches for a given search query.
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