5 Google Secrets Revealed!

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

For those who don’t know, Google posted a great writeup on their official blog outlining some of the details of how their Search Quality team is run and organized.  In the process, Udi Manber, Google VP of Engineering and Search Quality both gave us some insight into how the Google search teams work, and dispelled some common SEO myths.  In this post I’ll be going through what I think are the top five revelations from this article, and the follow up by Googler Matt Cutts.

1. Google Updates their Algorithm very frequently.
Udi Manber reveals to us that “In 2007, we launched more than 450 new improvements, about 9 per week on the average”.  This means that daily fluctuations in Search Engine Result Placement (SERP) can very well be attributed to tweaks in the Google ranking algorithm as well as general changes in the content and linking on the internet as detected by Google.  There are usually several major updates to the Google search algorithm every year, but it is very interesting that minor updates are made as often as multiple times per-day.  This means that the team working on the algorithm is extremely active and is constantly testing new ideas.

2. Search Quality is a large umbrella department within Google.
In the post, we are told that the Search Quality team within Google contains several other informal teams.  This is great information to know for those trying to understand how Google works.  The basic organization of the teams revealed by Google is displayed below.

3. PageRank is still a factor.
Finally putting to rest a hundred SEO forum arguments, here we hear it straight from the horse’s mouth: “PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system”.  No SEO campaign should have any excuse to completely ignore link building after seeing this.

4. International search has been a major focus for Google over the past 2 years.
Although Google’s dominance in the search market is something we in North America have sometimes taken for granted, this is certainly not the case in countries like Russia, who’s search market is dominated by the Yandex engine.  That Google would be working to gain market share in these areas isn’t exactly surprising, but it’s interesting that Udi Manber took the time to note this in public.  This tells us that these effort must be fairly intense - which makes sense if one takes into account that countries like India, and China are areas of incredibly high economic growth, and are becoming increasingly wired.  Enterprising business owners may soon be looking for multi-lingual search marketing campaigns.  Something to watch, to be sure.

5. Google is aiming to foster transparency.
This is definitely one of the most exciting announcements made by Udi Manber in the blog post.  Although very protective of their core ranking technology, Google has realized that transparency can be a good thing that inspires confidence and partnership.  I am very much looking forward to further announcements from the Google Search Quality team.

Posted by Chris Breikss on 05/21 at 09:47 AM
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