Search Engine Ranking: The Real Truth

There are perhaps more myths and urban legends about
how to get your website ranked well on the search
engines than any other subject on the Internet. In
this article, I'm going to tell you how you can tell
the fact from the fiction. After reading this
article, you will know how to get the current facts
about how any search engine ranks sites.

It is tempting to go to the various newsgroups,
mailing lists and discussion forums that are
frequented by webmasters to ask questions about
search engine ranking. Many of you have done this
and been bewildered by the amount and diversity of
advice offered. Some claim that you should use
white-on-white text to stuff your page with keywords
while others claim using white-on-white hidden text
will get you banned. Some say to use keywords in
your keywords meta-tag while others claim that
search engines don't even look at the meta-tags
anymore. Some claim that you must use short pages,
while others claim that long pages are better.

In almost every case, you will receive massively
contradictory advice if you ask other webmasters.
Even worse, sometimes almost all of the webmasters
will agree on some topic... and be dead wrong.
Sometimes the information is exactly right for
February, 1999 but is no longer accurate. Search
engines change their ranking algorithms constantly.

So how can you find the correct information? First,
let me say that I rarely worry about the search
engines at all anymore. There really are much more
effective means of driving traffic to your site than
worrying about the search engines. I recommend link
exchanges with sites of a similar topic to your own
and submitting articles to newsletters in your
category as much more effective means of marketing
than worrying about search engines. You should also
be aware that search engines keep a "blacklist" of
sites they have manually banned, often because the
owners bragged about some particular ranking attained
in some particular way. So, once you use the
following methods, I recommend that you keep specific
results to yourself. So let's dive into how to get
the search engine secrets.

Why not ask the search engines themselves? Of course,
all of the search engines claim to guard their
ranking secrets with great care, but that is actually
quite impossible. By it's very nature, every single
search engine has a publicly available database. All
you have to do to access their database is to enter a
search term. The search engine will happily tell you
all of the information you need to know about how it
ranks sites. All it takes is a little analysis of
the results.

Since a course in statistical analysis would be
really boring in a newsletter article (and not very
useful), I'll skip all of the theory and get down to
an actual example of how you can find the answer to
almost any question you have about search engine
ranking. Let's take an example step-by-step. Let's
say you just heard a rumor that a particular search
engine will rank you higher if your search term is
present in the title. Here are the steps you can
take to find out if that is true:

1. Pick twenty popular search terms.

2. Enter them at the selected search engine.

3. Review the first twenty results for each search
and write down the answer. Write a 1 if the answer
to your question is true for that listing and a 0
if it is false.

4. If the answers are all the same (either true or
false), you may need to use more than twenty results
for your study. If so, be consistent with all
search terms.

5. If the answers for the second half of your results
for all search terms is zero, you may need to include
some more search terms until you have a non-zero
result in the second half of your results.

6. Total the answers for all search terms for the
first half of your results. Separately total the
answers for all of your search terms for the second
half of your results.

7. Divide the total from first half of your results
by the total of the second half of your results.

8. If your answer is very close to the number 1, then
you will need to expand your search to more than
twenty popular search terms... or review more than
the top 20 results... or possibly accept that the
answer to your question is that this particular
factor is not very important to this search engine
either way (positive or negative).

9. If your answer is significantly more than 1, then
the answer to your question is true.

10. If your answer is significantly less than 1,
then the answer to your question is false.

If your question is regarding the formation of the
title, description, domain name or URL, this method
is all you need. If your question regards something
about the underlying sites (ie: keyword density, use
of header tags, hidden text, etc), then you may have
to visit each site listed in order to answer your
question.

I find it easier to turn each question into a
true/false question, but you can also use this method
with questions that have a numerical answer.

Now the real challenge is finding the questions, not
the answers. Recently a popular search engine
started ranking sites with dead links lower than
sites that quickly removed their dead links. This
became obvious when the above study was performed.
The challenge was to come up with the question: Do
dead links on your site hurt search engine ranking?

Feel free to drop me a note at
JamesBrausch@TargetBlaster.com with any interesting
finds using this method. Happy hunting!