Google

The browser is the user’s gateway to the world of internet and Google the tour guide. Big Tech fought browser wars and then search engine wars, both of which seem to have been won by Google for now. However, the internet landscape wasn’t always the way it is now. In fact, Google was not the first search engine and neither Chrome the first browser. However, both products came to dominate the web over time so much as that google is now officially a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Google has been the most influential search engine of the internet age and it is essential to understand how it works and ranks content to better one’s understanding of SEO. It has always been a cat and mouse game between Google and professional SEOs, where the latter exploit new hacks and tricks to rank content higher, only for the former to close the loopholes with an update to the myriad of algorithms used to rank content behind the scenes. As SEO practitioners, we shouldn’t look for hacks or shortcuts to get Google to rank content. In the short-term we may be successful but rest assured that Google will eventually catch up and any short-term gains will be lost. Rather, the best course of action is to align SEO with Google’s goal to present users with the most useful search query results.

PageRank

When Google came online, it took a very different approach than existing search engines to rank the internet. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, developed the PageRank algorithm, which powers the world’s largest search engine.

PageRank takes its inspiration from “citation analysis”, which is commonly used in academic fields to rank the importance of scholarly papers. In citation analysis, the quality and importance of a scholarly paper are determined by the number and quality of citations it receives from other papers. Similarly, in the PageRank algorithm, the quality and importance of a website are determined by the number and quality of links pointing to it. In turn, to determine the quality of a link, the PageRank algorithm takes into account the PageRank score of the linking website, the relevance of the linking page’s content to the linked page, and the anchor text used in the link. Not all links are created equal. A link from a high-quality, authoritative website carries more weight than a link from a low-quality website. The algorithm uses complex mathematical algorithms to determine the importance of each page based on the number and quality of links pointing to it.

To maximize our PageRank score, it’s important to focus on building high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites in our niche. This can be done through a variety of methods, including guest blogging, directory submissions, and link exchanges.

In essence, the PageRank algorithm borrows from the concept of citation analysis, as it assigns a score to each page based on the number and quality of links pointing to it. The higher the score, the higher the page will rank in search engine results. This allows Google to provide relevant and high-quality search results to its users.

Google updates

Google has released several major updates over the years to improve the quality of its search results and the ranking of websites. The goal of these updates has always been to improve the user experience. When updates are rolled out, they can both negatively or positively, a website’s ranking. For instance, one of the Google updates penalized unscrupulous websites that had bought backlinks in an attempt to improve search rankings. Yet another update started ranking mobile-friendly content higher in search results.

We document the major updates made by Google up until 2021 and a brief description of their purpose.