There’s always something to howl about.

Google Juice? Yeah…That Hits the Spot!

Lots of fun at the Bloodhound Blog lately! Unfortunately, I had to miss Unchained, but was able to catch enough on Youtube to realize that I missed out on a lot – not the least of which was a great networking opportunity. I’ve been enjoying BHB more and more, though, and I know it has to do with increasing the level of my participation.

I think it just took me a bit to get warmed up, and to find a topic that I could really sink my teeth into. As much as I love real estate, I’m a relative pup (5 years) compared with most of the ol’ dogs here, so it took the introduction of a pretty serious SEO debate to reel me in. I’m not here to grind this topic in. In fact, I think we’ve done a fine job getting the word out about a practice that bothers us. However, during the debate, the statement “No one really knows how Google works” was thrown out a few times. Because of this, I wanted to write a quick tutorial on one basic concept that we know Google uses, and that has been proven time & again to be correct.

Page Rank, or “Google Juice,” was developed by Larry Page & Sergey Brin in the mid 1990’s while students at Stanford. The algorithm utilizes the inherent democracy of the web, counts the links to different websites as votes for those particular sites, and so measures the relative importance of each website.

Rand Fishkin, of SEOMOZ, put together one of his fabulous illustrations demonstrating the very basic function of the Page Rank system:

innate-pagerank.JPG

Obviously, the algorithm is much more complex than this, but this gives us a very fundamental understanding of how Page Rank works, and why inbound links are so important. The web, according to Google, is one big popularity contest, with the authoritative sites (like BHB) holding a lot of the juice, and less authoritative sites (like my dinky search blog) carrying less juice.

The easiest (but not always the most accurate) way to measure the importance of a site/page is by looking at its PR on the Google Toolbar. (We’ll leave the difference between true PR & toolbar PR for another day.)

Really authoritative sites have lots of juice to give out, and so help the sites they’re linking to increase their own PR, and their own rankings. How does Google measure the PR that’s passed from these sites? Again, Rand has a great illustration.

pagerank-explained.JPG

Bloodhound Blog carries lots of juice, and Greg links to TONS of sites. This does nothing to hurt his own rankings (unless he accidentally links out to a bad neighborhood) but it does affect the amount of juice he’s giving to the sites he links to. However, BHB isn’t in the business of selling links, so who cares? The links are helpful to the end user, and they’re still helping out the recipient in the way of traffic and PR.

This is the fundamental basis of Google’s ranking algorithm. It is by NO means comprehensive – Google has gotten very good at determining the quality of links through other metrics. For more reading on SEO topics, I suggest checking out SEOMOZ, Sphinn, Matt Cutts blog, or hitting up my boy David for his great beginner’s guide to SEO.