The very basics of Google.
I love them, it, him, her! I do, I love Google! They are big, really big, and you have great chance to be treated fairly and get lots of traffic (Web site visitors) from them, if you, in turn, treat them fairly. Of
course, "fairly" is subjective. It doesn't hurt to help Google find what it is looking for - the extreme end of "helping Google find" would be to trick Google into thinking it found something that is not really there. This
would be abuse, Spam or call it what you like, and this is not what this article is all about.
What is Google? Unless you came to earth from another planet just yesterday, you know of course that Google is a search engine. Or really a network of computers that anybody can access and use, to look up where one would
find a certain type of information. When one performs a search, this network of computer looks through a searchable index (database) which it has created from information it has gathered from visiting millions upon millions of
Web pages – and points you to the pages it considers most closely matches your query.
How they gather the information. Google is of course also the beast that roams around gathering all the information it needs to create the database it will use to look up the crazy things that we ask for. Google's
Web-crawling "robot" is called Googlebot and it follows hyperlinks from one Web site to another; one Web page to another, gathering information about the content and structure of the pages it finds.
The Google circle of life.
- (1) Google starts the gathering of information for the database in the beginning of every month. If you do an update to your Web site, or put one on-line in the middle of the month you have lost the window of
opportunity to get those pages into Google. Just suck it up, add more great content and wait for the Googlebot to come and find your content next month.
If you have access to your Server Logs you should be able to
see when the Googlebot visited you. Over time you will see a pattern and get a general idea of when Google normally crawls the pages of your Web site. This gives you a chance to try to time your main Web site updates
accordingly.
Sometimes the Googlebot crawls your Web site in chunks over a couple of days but the first visit is the most crucial one to pay attention to.
- (2) Around the 25th of every month you will start seeing the new pages appearing in the search results. The ranking of Web pages for a specific search query can fluctuate greatly, and pages will disappear and reappear
in the results.
What is happening is that Google is adjusting the content of its index by applying different filters to get rid of, or penalizing, Web pages that do not follow the Google TOS (Terms of Service.) etc.
During this period you can watch what Google is currently working on by visiting www2.google.com instead of the main URL.
- (3) After about a week the index will stabilize and the content of the main URL will be identical to the "working environment" of www2. The Google PageRank (more of that later) will become more or less fixed for all
pages in the index.
- (4) Google continues to adjust its index throughout the month, but you will not see as drastic a change as in the end of each month. These fluctuations are mainly caused by Google catching and removing Web pages and
whole sites that do not follow the TOS. New and modified pages are also continually added to the index from Web sites that Google considers being "Fresh" (Web sites that are updated often.)
You can tell if a Web site
has a "Fresh" status if it's Web pages in the search results has a date associated with it. The date shows you when Google crawled the Web site.
Having a "Fresh" status is great! This means that your index pages are
always kept up to date in Google, and all pages that you link to from the main page are also kept up to date. Any modification you do to the content, or any pages you add (with a link from the index page), will appear in
Google the next day! Cool!
It is not only the big news sites that can get the Google "Fresh" status. Over time the Googlebot will notice if you frequently update your Web site and will mark it as a site it will check
often.
Google is all over the place!
There are quite a few organizations and search engines that serve up Google results. This year Netscape, MSN and AOL (with their 35 million subscribers) started using Google search results in their portals. If you do well in
Google, you will also do well with these, and all the other partners…
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