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Google’s Matt Cutts Speaks About Factors Effecting Search Rankings

Factors in Search Engine Optimization from Matt Cutts

In an interview published on March 14th, Google’s Matt Cutts outlined some of the factors that play a part in determining a website’s search rankings.  For many of you reading this article, the vast majority of those factors are completely controlled by your website developer.  So your best action plan as it relates to those elements is to hire a website builder that will build your site with both design and optimization best practices in mind.

However, one area that you can help control is the number of websites that link to yours.  And not just your website, but also all of the pages within your website.  When asked about how many pages Google will index within a website (which plays a big part in determining rankings), Matt Cutts made it very clear that links are a big part of that equation…  “There is also not a hard limit on our crawl.  The best way to think about it is that the number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank.  So if you have a lot of incoming links on your root page, we’ll definitely crawl that.  Then your root page may link to other pages, and those will get PageRank and we’ll crawl those as well.  As you get deeper and deeper in your site, however, PageRank tends to decline.”

So I know what you are thinking… let’s develop as many links as possible from as many websites as we can.  Your on the right track, but proceed with caution.  The value of the website that is linking to your website is as important as the link itself.  Relevance and credibility of the site play a part in how much value will be given for that link.  Especially if the link is coming from a website known for selling links, or as Google likes to call them “spammy” websites.

This is a common tactic used by companies that solicit their optimization services with offers that are too good to be true… “guaranteed page one ranking on Google for only $500!”.  As my mother always says, you get what you pay for!  These types of optimization companies will sell links from websites in which their only purpose is to create link juice.  So when implemented, the website experiences a temporary boost in rankings – “Hello first page of Google”.  But once these tricky links are discovered, the value of the link is lowered and the rankings are lost – “Easy come, easy go”.

The best bet in creating these valuable links is to contribute to the on-line community in relevant and legitimate ways.  Blogging, Twittering, FaceBook, YouTube, LinkedIn – all are great ways to establish relevant inbound links to your website.  Or, you could always hire a legitimate search engine optimization company to do it for you

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