Trent Allan Explains Google Search - Ziller Web Marketing Blog

We thought it would be cool to make our next blog post a little more personal. Recently, Trent Allan, the head honcho hear at Ziller, gave a speech at a Toastmasters presentation talking about what he is most passionate about – Google search. The objective of the speech was to generate interest in how the world’s biggest search engine works, and how it ties in with search engine optimisation below. You check out the vid below. We’ve also featured a clean transcript for you to take away from the video – enjoy!

Transcript

“I’d like to talk to you today about the logic of Google search … The purpose of my speech is to tell all of you a little bit more about the Google search engine and how it works, to tell you a little bit about the structure of a search engine results page, tell you a little bit about how Google goes about finding all the websites that it includes in its search engine, and lastly the ways in which it organises all of the results listed on the results page by order of rank.

To begin with, let’s look at the structure. Now if you could all visualise the Google results search page, on the left you have what is called the organic or natural search results. Up the top, and down the right, you have the paid results. Now the difference between the paid results and organic results is that basically the top and the right search listings are advertisements. You pay to get placed in that area of search, however you can’t pay for high inclusion into the ‘organic’ listings on the left. You can however pay people to optimise a site to rank higher organically, which delves into SEO, but you can not control the exact outcome of where and when you will appear higher up in organic search results.

Believe it or not, 90% of Google’s profit is actually made through paid search – or the ads on the right. This is an extraordinarily important part of Google’s business, and because of that reason they need to make sure that their search engine is the damn best search engine there is because if they start delivering incorrect results, people will not pay to get listed, and they would subsequently lose their primary revenue stream.

Obviously in order to be the best, Google needs to have a vast knowledge of the most relevant websites to include for search results. To calculate which sites to include, Google regularly crawls and identifies websites at different frequencies. Known as the ‘crawl rate’, this facet of search dictates how frequently the search results relating to a website are updated. For example, sites that are perpetually generating content, such as news websites for example, would be crawled and have their search results updated probably 10 times more than that of a standard website with static pages. This is because Google identifies that certain websites will be updated more than others.

Now that you have an understanding of how Google crawls websites to include them in search and update them, let’s look at how Google actually ranks them in terms of priority, or rank. For example, if you go to Google and punch in a search term. Let’s say, ‘public speaking tutorials’, for example. When you punch in this search term the search engine will return listings ranked in order of 1-10 on the search engine result page. Google’s job is to make sure that the first result listed for that search term is of maximum relevancy to what you searched for.

There are 2 main factors that determine the rank of a website search result for a keyword. These are relevancy and popularity. Relevancy obviously refers to the relation of the topic of a website to the search term. If we searched for ‘public speaking tutorials’, then we would expect that the content contained within the pages of the website ranking 1st are close to 100% relevancy to what we’re searching for. Once Google has determined how relevant the website is to the search result, then it begins to look at the popularity of the website being listed. For example, if a lot of people are linking to the website and sharing links to the website, Google can identify that the website is highly sought after and therefore should be placed conveniently at the top of the search engine results page for the relevant search term.

The way that popularity, as mentioned, is based on links. For example, if website A links to website B, then Google considers that a link ‘vote’ for website B. One funny story of link popularity is back when George Bush was running for election, what a bunch of guys figured out is that if you linked a whole heap of anchor text using a keyword to the Whitehouse website using the keyword ‘moron’, when you Google’d ‘moron’, George Bush appeared as the very first search result. This was 10 years ago though, and Google has changed their algorithm so that your website must include instances of that keyword before it can be considered to rank strongly for a specific keyword.

I hope by now you have a better understanding of how Google works. The reason why I brought up this topic is because it’s popular conversation between friends, and it seems that a lot of people are interested in this general topic so I thought it would be cool to bring up. I’ve talked you about the structure of the search results page, and how Google goes about finding the websites to include, I’ve spoken to you about the crawl rate, I’ve also talked to you about the ranking factors, popularity and relevancy, and yeah… While this knowledge obviously won’t land you a job at Google, at least now you can walk away with a better understanding of how it all works and the significance of what it does. Thanks.“

In the last ten years of the web, we’ve witnessed the rise of the unstoppable freight train that is Google. Extremely crafty and ingenious in the ways in which they innovate, we’ve seen them knock over the title of world’s largest search engine, pioneer web metrics, and occasionally have a dig at social networking; the latter of which has never been taken too seriously.

As a search engine, Google has always been perceived to be too impersonal and sterile to be able to successfully function as a hub for online social activity. Instead, we’ve seen the figureheads Facebook and Twitter set the standard for engaging social activity online. Google Wave, to its credit, was never intended to be a social networking platform but instead a community-driven tool of productivity. To be fair, the only direct attempt that Google has made at competing with Facebook was Google Buzz. I guess that you could say that it was a trial and error exercise for Google. They saw a hole in the market open up, and they lunged at it, without properly formulating something built entirely for the people, which ultimately, is the core factor in a social network becoming popular.

This is how Facebook achieved greatness. While Facebook did pioneer a lot of things, they did not invent the idea of the social network. The social network has been around since the days of ‘Yahoo! Geocities’. What gave Facebook their success, most notably over networking giants MySpace.com, is that they refined the idea, simplified it, and ultimately made it better.

A good social network is a hybrid of its predecessors, and this is exactly what Google has just achieved with Google+.

What makes Google+ so different.

Again, the key to a successful social network is one that is built purely to meet the demands of the general public. Translated into what needs to be achieved in order to harbour online loyalty, we simply need to look at what Facebook has done, and how Google+ has improved upon it.

Google+ addresses Facebook’s fatal flaws.

Facebook became popular because it virtually rendered Internet anonymity obsolete. All of a sudden, there was a social net work that was not only encouraging, but almost forcing you to be you online. It also introduced the status update, which left you feeling fanatical about checking your ‘newsfeed’ to see which one of your ‘friends’ was in a new relationship, who had chicken for dinner last night, which one of them got so drunk they passed out, etc.

For Facebook there were of course flaws. For example, everyone on your ‘friends’ list appears in your newsfeed, and everything you post appears in theirs. Unless you ‘block’ someone from viewing your profile, as long as you’re friends with them, then they’re always going to see what you’re up to. This element is kind of invasive. For example, if your boss adds you on Facebook (Hi, Trent!), or you’ve got your Great Aunty Flo on there, the next time you post something, let’s say “got way too drunk, ate a bunch of hotdogs and puked on my mate’s lawn”, then they’re going to know about it. 

Google+ addresses this major flaw in social networking by allowing you to assign the people you ‘follow’ into groups, or ‘circles’, from the get-go. You can have separate newsfeeds for family members, drinking buddies, work colleagues, team mates… You get the idea.

Google+ is born for mobile.

Google+ is a social network that will be born into the age of the smart phone, whereas the likes of Facebook have had to adapt. This is a massive new feature that Google+ boasts over its competitors because the social network is already engineered to fit in with a smart-phone savvy search engine. Unlike Facebook, when you upload photos on Google+ from your mobile, there is no load time. As soon as you take a picture – it’s online, waiting in a private album, ready for you to edit or delete.

It has a cleaner, intuitive user-interface

This means less time spent working out what you would like to do, and more time being able to organise and edit the content that matters most to you. I almost feel like I’m selling the product as I write this, but I actually endorse this feature 100%. Facebook is full of junk you couldn’t give a damn about. Your newsfeed can become littered by posts from fan pages you ‘liked’ and forgot about eons ago. If you make a mistake typing a status update, then you have to manually delete it and retype it. Google+ on the other hand gives you more control over what goes in and out of your primary newsfeed, lets you build up a hearty catalogue of ‘favourited’ links, and even lets you freely edit typing mistakes in posts without you have to delete anything.

In summing up – it’s definitely the simple things that will make Google+ big. Will it overtake Facebook? Well, Facebook certainly has a head start so one can only speculate. I think what it will do, however, is revolutionise the standard for social networking and force Facebook to reevaluate the core features of their network.

The formula that Google has concocted for Google+ is pure genius. We’ve been talking about it all week at Ziller, and we personally can’t wait to see it go live in the next couple of months!

What are your thoughts? Will Google+ throw Facebook off its pedestal?

One thing we know for sure about Google is that they’re always looking for new and unique ways to improve the relevancy of their search results. For a while now, Google has been dropping obvious hints towards the growing importance of the ‘social’ aspect of search and the ability for people to contribute to and vote towards other user-generated data.

Well, now they’re going as far as to experiment with a new Facebook style ‘like’ button.

When signed into your Google Account, when browsing the web, the search engine will present you with a ‘+1’ option beside the search result. If you click on the ‘+1’, you’re publicly endorsing the website and recommending it to other people who may be looking through similar search results.

Although it’s in beta phase (of course), you can sign up to participate here.

The remains however as to whether or not this new feature, should it ever become widely implemented, will be allowed to have a direct influence on search results?

With regular advocation of user generated content of popular quality in order to perform well in search engines, this new feature would reinforce Google’s stance on the issue and promote user-controlled voting as opposed to search results that have been manipulated by SEO’s. Should the new ‘like’ button have an impact on search engines, you would think that search results would become a lot more relevant and refined based on the nature of what you’re searching for. 

For one, if it did have an impact on search results, it would be cool to see the amount of times people have hit the ‘+1’ button next to your own search listing in Google Analytics.

From an outside perspective, though, as a search marketer there’d be no way of knowing just how well your competitor’s websites are performing for the amount of ‘plus ones’ they’ve received in comparison to your own website. Because the system is based on your own Google Account, and who your Google Account is networked with. The only time your endorsements are made public is when a user view them via your Google Profile.

Is this a new invisible ranking factor? We’re not sure, but we think that it very well could be in the near future should it prove to be a popular feature among users.

If you want to learn more about this new feature, you can visit the Google ‘+1’ information page here.

As a search marketer, nothing frustrates me more than anything else in the world than Google PageRank. Why? Because the concept itself is vague, and according to Google’s head of search, PageRank is a nominated assignment of a value that is calculated when the search engine adds up the total authority of your links that are, might I add, subjectively determined by the search engine according to their perceived value.

Now, when I mentioned ‘percieved value’ – it has been established that not only does the search engine divide up equal amounts of PageRank based on the number of links, but it also deploys a ‘decay’ factor as well to depreciate the value of certain links. This is to stop the infinite flow of PageRank in loops, and is applied without discrimination, even on sites that do not infinitely loop their link structure.

For a detailed breakdown, you can read the original article and conversation here.

One thing that did strike me curiously though, is Google’s changing stance on PageRank.

As of last year, and to date actually, they’ve made it abundantly clear that they want most websites to be passing PR freely, creating a perpetual flow of links for search engines to crawl and index without any impositions created by the web master.

In simpler words, Google wants a website’s link structure to be promoting ‘free love’ with the ‘rel=nofollow’ attribute used minimally and only when necessary.

It’s a total Woodstock for internal link love… But the effect it has on the PageRank of the website, does it really matter?

The answer is no.

Here’s why: While a website can still garner PageRank strategically through the sculpting of internal link structure, and can reap small benefits with regards to the performance of the website for organic search results, it will be of more benefit to your website to concentrate your efforts on (as Google put it) “a solid information architecture – intuitive navigation, users and search-engine friendly URLs” etc.

It makes sense, and through my own work, I’ve seen the truth in this statement first hand.

In fact, I can confirm that since the construction of one of our client websites mid-2010, we have increased the percentage share of search engine referrals consistently on a monthly basis for 5 months, with organic search referrals comprising of approximately 60% of our traffic sources despite the PR measure being zero. And did we achieve this by focusing on how our internal link structure was sculpted to pass PageRank? No way.

Rigorous user-interface testing and re-modelling, a search-engine friendly web design, external web marketing activities such as one way link building and seeding good old fashioned conversation in relevant online communities brought us our success.

So, why raise the topic in the first place?

After reading a lot on the subject lately, I just felt that we should disinter some of the myths surrounding PageRank and the effect it has on search engine performance. PageRank is a value assigned to web page based on the number of ‘points’ it receives from each link pointing towards it. But it is only one ranking factor out of god knows how many that Google has operating, and it is by far not the most important.

The PR metric can be both sluggish and inaccurate at times, with updates at irregular intervals. For one website’s PageRank to be recalculated, it could be a matter of months whereas another website’s PageRank value might be recalculated within a week of the site’s growth.

If PageRank has ever been your primary concern, don’t let it be. Your website can still rank exceptionally well across the board with or without it. Resolutely, there are much more significant and impactful elements of your SEO campaign that you could be devoting your time to.

This week, two representatives from Google and Bing shared an interview with one of the SEOMoz team members, and needless to say dropped a bit of a bombshell on search marketing after clearing the fog on one of SEO’s most vague of topics.

Do Facebook and Twitter, with their respective social authorities, have a an impact on SEO? The answer has been confirmed as yes.

It’s a revelation that has been a long time coming. After months of speculation after hearing of Google and Bing’s decision to buddy up with Twitter, and Google’s hint towards giving Facebook profiles more prominence in search results, a lot of us could see the possibility of the rumour becoming a reality – but we could never be certain.

In search engine optimisation, knowing the technical element of the practice made us a little skeptical towards acknowledging that search engines would one day let social authority influence search results – primarily due to the easy levels of manipulation that came with it as baggage.

But that’s exactly it. The answer is how the major search engines have coined the term, and how this term is to be literally applied to SEO.

‘Social/Author authority’ is something that both Google and Bing have deemed as having a legitimate influence on what users want to see when they’re searching for topics of interest, or trying to locate recorded conversation.

And regarding the influence on SEO? You’re only interested to hear about link weight, right? Well, let’s put it this way. Google and Bing are only interested in measuring signals indicative of ‘author quality’, implying that any link shared will be evaluated based on the impact of its context.

Something kind of like this:

One can envisage that the link weight would be calculated by things such as timing and relevancy, the surrounding content, the diversity of resources and even the level of engagement – but as to how the search engines calculate these factors, we can only speculate.

It looks likely that for now, the only way for a shared link in a social context to have any impact is for the user sharing it to be a powerful author/creator.

Google has even stated that author authority is independent of PageRank, however is limited to what topics of relevance it is applied to in search. It will be interesting to see how this kind of thing develops, however for the time being, unless you’re CNN or Ashton Kutcher – your social profile ain’t gonna have much of an impact!

But think about it… If a search engine were to try and identify and give value to a link placed within a viral context, how would it determine the link’s authority? Here’s a few interesting points:

1. You’d need to be the most popular kid in school – They’ve pretty much given this one away already, but for your link to be considered even remotely authoritative, the social profile through which you’re sharing it will need to be exceedingly popular. This is because the more users you have engaging with your social profile, the more human credibility you’re given. Google has always been about giving the users genuine material, search results that are generated by humans and targeted at humans. Bing also follows suit. It just makes sense.
2. The profile of the people interacting with you – If you are perceived to be a big fish, interacting with a pool full of sharks, then there’s going to be a lot more emphasis placed on what you say, and who you say it to. This would be a quintessential part of calculating author authority.
3. Reciprocity – The frequency of interactions and exchanges between profiles, who you are interacting with and who is interacting back.
4. Relevance of what you’re talking about – This one’s a no brainer. It needs to be relevant to something being searched.
5. Who you’re writing for – Obviously if you’re only out to give yourself a pat on the back, then the search engines aren’t going to regard your social commentary as important because you’re not contributing anything of objective, unbiased value.

What do you think?

to us, it’s clear that the major search engines are continuing their push towards more contextual organic search results. The good news is that its a significant step towards cleaning up search that is heavily populated by spam and artificial websites, the down side on the other hand, is that whist there will be a vast number of human-edited resources available, they may not always be as informative as intended.

For example, if I’m searching for a clear cut guide to caring for tropical fish, then I’m not going to want to have to dig through a whole heap of social conversation around the subject just to locate a solid answer to my question.

However, if I’m looking for experiences in caring for tropical fish – the vast availability of valued opinions is going to benefit me greatly, because I’m going to want to hear about what people have to say, and these guys will, too

As for online marketing, it may very well be time to sit down and re-assess your strategy, because the bond between SEO and social media just got even closer.

This morning at approximately 9:30 the team at Ziller noticed something, Google was down. Both the .com.au and .com domain were inaccessible for around 15 minutes. It makes you realise they are human after all.

For many years now I have been very impressed with Google and everything that they do. They always seem to be developing and always seem to get it right. I look at the way Microsoft and a lot of other companies do things and thought if they only followed Google’s path they would be in a much better place. Take Yahoo’s sponsored search and compare it to Google’s AdWords – its a joke how far ahead Google are.

Now just as I finish praising Google I am going to take a little stab at them. As mentioned I never ever found a fault with their services and everything was always perfect, however in the past couple of weeks some things have been brought to my attention that Google may be looking to far ahead and not giving their current projects enough attention.

One example is my Google Calendar – I use it all the time and rely on it to organise my life (and business) however two days ago I noticed that the email reminders I set for my events just stopped sending. Luckily I remembered these events on my own so it was not too much of an issue, but how can it just stop all of a sudden? This is such a critical feature to go wrong if they expect their calendar to be successful. I later did a few searches on the internet and I found other people with similar issues, but as yet no fix.

There were a bunch of other similar things that happened causing me to right this post that I wont get into, however the point I am making is that I had such high respect for anything Google did, if they brought out a new feature I would use it instantly because if it was Google it had to be good.

I guess though after all Google are human and humans do make mistakes, it’s only because of their success and such high quality services provided in the past that they get criticised when small things go wrong.