So I was sitting in the office a few days ago and I saw a reference to Search Engine Ranking factors created and published by SEOmoz. It was one of the first documents I read when I joined Pin Digital and I think its a must read for anyone who works in search marketing.
Anyway, this reference made me quickly open a spreadsheet a start to list what factors I believed played a part in the Google Search Algorithm. I just listed them as quickly as I could, then kept it open in the background as I did some client work. I flicked back every so often to add more ideas to the list. Before I knew it, I'd compiled over 50 factors. Some were related to each other but on the whole I tried to come up with different factors, I can always expand them later.
I also sent an internal email to everyone to see what they thought was important for a website in the eyes of Google.
According to Google, there are over 200 factors they look at when deciding how to rank a website for a search query. I quickly realised as I was going through this list that there were fundamentally two types of factors, those which were related to the website itself and those which are related to the search query. Here is an example -
Website Ranking Factor - Domain Age
Query Ranking Factor - Query in Page Title
Website Ranking Factor - Page Load Time
Query Ranking Factor - Relevance of content to the Query
As the list got bigger, my mind wandered a little bit and I started to think about giving each factor a score. Then I thought about what would happen if I ran some analysis of the top 10 search results for a popular query, gave them a score for each of the factors in my list, combined these scores and see if there was a correlation between my own scores and the results Google gave me.
It was at this point that I realised that I was starting to reverse engineer the Google Search Algorithm. I seemed to be setting myself an impossible task! I thought about it and how stupid it seemed -
- Google have thousands of Phd employees working on this every day of the week
- It has developed over the last 11 years into the best search engine algorithm online.
- It has improved over the last 6 years to weed out people who try to game the system and manipulate results. I haven't got access to the huge vault of user data Google gathers
- Too many other negatives to mention!
It was at this point I spoke out loud about this to Steve and Tracey, they both seemed enthusiastic about my idea. Until Steve came up with challenges for himself and Tracey which he believed to be on a similar level -
- Working out the recipe to Coca-Cola
- Working out the Colonels secret chicken recipe
So this is where I'd like your help, who do you think has the most chance of completing the following challenges -