Google Search Techniques

Posted on October 7, 2008
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Disclaimer: Using Google to search the Internet will locate resources that are available to the public. While these resources are good for some purposes, serious research and academic work often requires access to databases, articles and books that, if they are available online, are only accessible by subscription. Fortunately, the UMass Library subscribes to most of these services. To access these resources online, go to the UMass Library Web site (library.umass.edu). For the best possible help finding information on any topic, talk to a reference librarian in person. They can help you find the resources you need and can teach you some fantastic techniques for doing your own searches.

For a complete guide to Google’s features go to http://www.google.com/help/

Simple Search Strategies

Google keeps the specifics of its page-ranking techniques secret, but here are a few things we know about what makes pages appear at the top of your search:
-   your search terms appears in the title of the web page
-   your search terms appear in links that lead to that page
-   your search terms appear in the content of the page (especially in headers)
When you choose the search terms you enter into Google, think about the titles you would expect to see on these pages or that you would see in links to these pages. The more well-known your search target, the more easy it will be to find. Obscure topics or topics that share terms with more common topics will take more work to find.

Enter a single word

Enter the one word that you associate with your topic. Typically this will return too many results (unless the term is a commercial trademark and you are looking for the company’s web site).

Enter several words

When you enter more than one word, Google assumes you want pages with ALL of these words present. This also often returns too many results. The pages you get will have all the words in any order, and they may or may not be near each other. For example, if you enter a first and last name, you may get some pages of the person you seek, but unless they are very well known, you will also get pages where a list of names contains one person with the first name and another person with the last name.
Note: Google will exclude common words (“where”) and single letters and numbers (“A” or “2”) to speed up your search if these are essential to finding what you need, see below for ways to make sure they are included.

Enter a phrase in quotes

This is the most effective way to limit a search. Google will return pages with these words in this exact order. This is good if you are searching for a specific phrase (“PowerPoint is Evil”) a name, (“Edward Tufte”) or if there is a sentence that you would associate with the page you seek (“How to use PowerPoint”). Quotes will also force Google to search for excluded terms.“I Feel Lucky” takes you to the top item in the search

If you use Google to find sites that you know are popular (such as the Apple Web site), you can click the “I Feel Lucky” link to bypass the search results and go straight to the top of the list. While this works well for commercial sites, it is less certain for other searches. Some practical jokesters have exploited this feature (try searching for “weapons of mass destruction”).

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What Search Engines Want

Posted on October 6, 2008
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From the search engines’ perspective, they want to understand some other things about a link, before they can decide the answers to your questions.

Why Does This Link Exist?

The primary question for search engines is why a given link exists at all. For your internal links, those that they find in the body copy, with a visible (blue and underlined) link, are most likely there to help your users.

What about links that are concealed (no visible indication that it’s a link), buried (tiny text in the footer of the page), or both? Isn’t it likely that you only put those links there to influence your rankings?

Which link do you think they trust more?

Why Was This Link Given?

So it goes with links from other sites. At the core of any search engines efforts to fight “link spam” will be an effort to determine the intent of each link. When it comes to external links, the question is the same; it’s just asked a little differently.

When you find a link from one web site to another, there are only a few ways that it got there. I break them into five main categories:

Stolen links exist because some web applications (blogs, directories, and many insecure scripts) allow users to add links to a web page. For example, when blogs were new and nofollow didn’t exist, spammers could easily create links to a site simply by adding worthless comments to blog posts.
Bartered links are more of a gray area for search engines. Aside from link exchanges, this category also includes signature links in forums, and those found on social networking sites like Squidoo. Depending on the value of the
contribution to a forum or social network, these may be more like stolen links. Bartered links aren’t necessarily endorsed by the site owner, but they’re allowed because the site owner gets something in return – usually content or a return link. When a link is given in return, search engines can detect this relationship and discount the value of the link.
Manufactured links mostly exist because someone has gone out of their way to create entire web sites and web pages so that they can use this content for linking purposes. This is known as “link farming” and it’s difficult
for the search engines to detect. Another type of manufactured link exists, though, because there’s a whole
class of web sites that are creating by “screen scraping” search results, stealing content, modifying RSS feeds, and other nonsense. As a side effect, websites that are present in search results usually pick up a slow but steady stream of manufactured links that they didn’t really ask for.
Purchased or rented links are not really a gray area for the search engines. These links may be legitimate and profitable advertising for the buyer, or they may be created solely for the purpose of influencing search engine rankings.If search engines get better at detecting and filtering out these links, their effectiveness will decline. SEO people are a resourceful bunch, so there will always be new schemes designed to avoid detection. Personally, I buy links when it makes sense because of branding or direct traffic value.
Given links or editorial links are what the search engines value the most. If they could rank pages based on the natural links that are created because one person actually likes and recommends another site, they’d be able to
deliver the best possible search results.

Within the last category, what search engines really want are the “natural links of pure love,” as I described. But there are other types of editorial link.

Every time an online news story talks about Apple and the iPod, there’s a good chance that those words will be linked to Apple’s website. This is just an editorial reference, but it still sends a little link juice their way.

If I link to the Microsoft web page with the words “evil empire” I am probably not recommending Microsoft’s products… but I would be sending them some PageRank nonetheless.

Search engines would probably like to be able to tell the difference between these types of links. They’d like to be able to break links down into even finer categories than I have.

For most readers, your approach to building links will depend, to an extent, on what you think search engines are capable of doing today, what they may become capable of doing in the future, and how you expect them to respond to different types of links.

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Why Site Structure Is Important

Posted on October 4, 2008
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While most of your competitors are still trying to use a “sledgehammer” approach, and overwhelming the search engines with massive quantities of inbound links, you can gain a tremendous advantage by paying attention to how your site is linked together.

There are four primary goals in structuring, or restructuring, a web site:

Improving the user experience is your first goal, because this leads to higher conversion rates, happy customers, etc. If I ever have to choose between creating a good user experience and an SEO objective, I will choose my site’s visitors every time.
Improving the “crawlability” of the site and channeling “link juice” (Page Rank at Google, other search engines have their own formulas) into the most important pages – the ones that you’re trying to get ranked in search results. The method we use for this is called dynamic linking.
Increasing the ranking of individual web pages within the site, and “broadening the profile” of our most important pages. By using the “anchor text” of our own internal links, and adding the right links in strategic places, we can boost our own search engine rankings.
Getting more pages into the search engines’ index, also known as “index
penetration.” Every additional page that gets indexed adds to our ability to improve our rankings, and in fact makes it easier to increase index penetration.

It shouldn’t be terribly shocking that the four stages of the “site structure” step are mapped against these four goals.

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