What is Google’s Search Algorithm?

To answer this questions we need to define – what is an algorithm? Wikipedia states that in maths or computer science an algorithm is an effective method for solving a problem expressed as a finite sequence of instructions. Put simply – an algorithm is set of steps for solving a particular problem.

So when applying this to Google’s Algorithm – Google uses a tool called PageRank which is a link analysis algorithm. The PageRank Google Algorithm gives a numerical weighting to each page on the internet in order to measure the importance within the group of pages.

Basically, PageRank is determined by how popular your website is, so the more incoming links you have to your site from external sites the more votes you have. If you have lots of pages linking to you and these pages have high PageRank, then this PageRank will pass through to your site.

PageRank ranges from between 0 to 10, there are only a very few websites that actually have a PageRank of 10 – the best example of this is the World Wide Web Consortium website: www.w3.org.

Ultimately Google’s search algorithm uses PageRank to determine where to list your site in the search engine results pages (SERPs), however there are many other factors which affect PageRank and Google unfortunately doesn’t give any specific information on these.