Google: Rise to the Top

Google is a huge growing company, currently it has 20+ thousand employees in more than 30 countries. Out of the 20,000+ employees, less than 200 employees are really important. Like all companies, there are core departments and there is the rest. It's the quality control department that decides what to do with all the websites, what to display and how to rank the results when it comes to search.

Every year, Google's quality control team does one or two “clinics.” A clinic is a public session where Google's quality control analyse and explain what's good or bad in various websites. Many people, like consultants, try to do the equivalent to Google clinics, but… they don't know! The consultants guess. Sometimes they are correct, but more often than not they are often wrong! The only people that “know” are the quality control people at Google.

Last year, Google did a clinic in London, UK. Here are some of the “important” points:

  1. Google's purpose is to display relevant information when users search for something1.
  2. Google has published almost all of its requirements at: http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Google wants:

  • Good title page. The title must be descriptive, unique and relate to the content of the web page
  • Good description. The description must be unique, descriptive or enticing enough and relate to the content of the web page
  • Page headings. Google only analyses h1, h2, and h3 tags. If you need to ask what's h1, h2… search for “HTML H2”. You'll need to learn.
  • Provide Google with the proper tools to crawl your website: robots.txt and sitemaps
  • Google prefers How Tos
  • There's no penalty for duplicate content. The Google team has confirmed it, but Google hides the duplicate content in the results. That's only if you are not a “content farm” stealing content from other websites and using it for affiliate links and ads on your own website.
  • Use: http://web-sniffer.net to check how Google sees not your website, but your web server2.
  • If you install Google's Chrome web browser, you can type “cache:website the-URL” into the address bar and see the web pages that Google has copied into its index.3

  1. According to Google's financials, 93.5% of it's income is from advertising. On a result page, 1 click in 4 is a paid result. If Google presents relevant information, the user will come back to Google, if not, they may switch to Bing ↩

  2. You can use this not only for your website, but any website ↩

  3. You can use this not only for your website, but any website ↩