How Does Google Rank Websites?

Google is by far the most dominant search engine, since its inception in 1998, it has covered a multitude of subjects across a plethora of countries. Currently, it covers an average of 40,000 search queries every single second, this translates to a stunning 3.5 billion searches a day. The sheer amount of people using Google daily ensures that subjects you’ve never even heard of are constantly being accessed on websites that didn’t even exist several minutes ago, the internet is constantly changing and evolving in order to meet the demands of its users making you ponder the subject: “How does Google even decide how to rank all these websites?”. There is a document of over a hundred pages produced by Google that states exactly how and why they rank websites the way that they do. In order to save you the effort of having to look through over a hundred pages of fancy internet jargon, I’ve compiled some of the documents’ key points below.

Search Raters

Fully judging the quality of a website through the use of technology does not offer a complete picture of its overall quality, this is why Google employs search raters. Search raters are, in essence, third-party workers with a deep understanding of Google’s guidelines who submit feedback on the changes Google can implement in order to improve user experience. Since it would be a colossal task to have their raters check every single task on the internet, Google doesn’t actually use the feedback provided to specifically rate the website they received feedback on (stick with me here) but rather the rating of every website. Based on the feedback itself they can isolate which parts of the page the raters look upon favourably and implement that within their algorithm to rank the websites that incorporate this.

Page Design  

Every website has its own niche design so categorising what’s better and what’s worse is a slight challenge even for Google, since it’s unable to actually go from page to page and gauge the quality of the website by hand it employs a series of checks. In order to judge the quality of the page, it looks at; the amount of adverts present is the main piece of content at the top of the page and even the geographical location of images and videos on the page. Funnily enough, this isn’t actually a measure for the quality of page design but rather one for page functionality where if a website has pages that guarantee a quality user experience, they naturally place themselves higher.

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