How Google Determines the Order of Search Results

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ADJ Scores Higher PageRank

First Published: ADawnJournal.com Jul 31, 2008

Recently, Google just updated their PageRank, and A. Dawn Journal (ADJ) scored a higher PageRank. Previously, ADJ PageRank was 1, and now ADJ gets a PageRank of 3. You may ask, “What is PageRank and why it is important?” Today, I am going to discuss what PageRank is, why it is important, and how Google (or other search engines) decides the order of search results.

How Google Determines the Order of Search Results

When you input keywords into Google’s “Search” box to perform a search, there are many factors that decide the order of search results. Google uses a mathematical formula called an Algorithm to display search results in order. This formula has roughly two hundred components and each component is looking for a specific part of a website to determine the total score of each website’s search results. Based on these scores, websites will be placed high or low in search results. For websites, it is very important to appear on the first few pages of search results – most people are not going to sift through some 20 million or so search results.

What Components Google Looks For

Here is just a few of the 200 components Google looks for:

  • PageRank
  • Placement of keywords
  • Use of keywords
  • Themes
  • HTML coding
  • How old is the domain?
  • Website traffic
  • Where the website is hosted

What Is PageRank?

 PageRank is Google’s way of deciding how important a website is. PageRank represents a numeric value from 1 to 10, one being the lowest and ten being the highest. To the best of my knowledge, only six sites have PageRank 10. These sites are:

 Adobe
The White House
US Government Website
National Science Foundation
World Wide Web Consortium
Google search

 What Determines PageRank?

 If a site is linking to another site, Google counts this as a vote and the more votes there are, the more important a site is. This sounds very simple, but there are many other elements to it and the whole PageRank thing is very complicated. Let me give you an easy example: ADJ is a personal finance website. If another high-ranking website such as Get Rich Slowly links to ADJ, it will be very good for ADJ PageRank. However, if a junk website links to ADJ, it will hurt ADJ PageRank. If you are interested in finding out more about PageRank, do a Google search for PageRank and read a few sites or visit Wikipedia’s PageRank page

 Why PageRank is Important

 PageRank is the heart of Google search and is one of the most significant components that determine the order of search results. Newer sites usually have zero, meaning no PageRank. It is every webmaster’s dream to achieve a higher PageRank, thus attracting more traffic. That’s why PageRank is so important.

 If you had performed a search last week by typing “Canada personal finance” in the Google “Search” box, you would have seen ADJ after five or six pages of results. Alternatively, a search for “Canada personal finance blog” would have put ADJ on the second or third page. But now, a search for “Canada personal finance” pulls up ADJ on the second or sometimes the first page and “Canada personal finance blog” search is steadily putting ADJ on the first page.

 Only Because Of You

 ADJ is a relatively new site and going through tremendous growth. The higher PageRank and momentum in growth has only been made possible because of readers like you. I would like to take this opportunity to thank ADJ readers. Thank you for all your support and thank you for reading ADJ regularly. I know that all of this is only possible because of you and your support.