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How Google Changed The Rules Of The Game
By Syed K. Rizvi

It was way back in 1998, towards the end of the year, that a close friend of mine suggested I try a new search engine called Google for my online information seeking activities. I took his recommendation and ... voila … I was finding amazingly more relevant results than what I used to get with other search platforms including Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos etc. Needless to say, that since those days I haven't reverted to other engines for searching.

A couple of years later, being a web marketing consultant at Bizliner Pvt Ltd. I was assigned the execution of a search engine marketing campaign for Chenab Sports Pvt Ltd, leading manufacturers of hockey sticks and martial arts equipment. By that time, SEO in Pakistan was still in its infancy stage. Infact it was us who convinced the management of Chenab Sports to pursue a new channel in their marketing strategy.

On my own, and from a webmasters point of view, I did a thorough study on how exactly a search engine functions, why various engines return different ranks for the same website and what could be done to improve these results for the promoted website. Within the scope of this study was an analysis of how search technology was moving with time.

I came to recognize that before the advent of Google, search engines used to only consider on-the-page factors such as headlines, bolded text, page title & meta tags, alt tag etc. when ranking a website for a specific keyword phrase. The Breakthrough that Google brought was to give more importance to the off-the-page factors when determining the relevancy of a web page to searcher's query words.

Off-the-Page factors basically meant links from other websites to the one in question. Google started analyzing the link structure of the web, what external links were signaling about the website they were taking the visitor to and if they had to do anything with the searcher's query phrase or not. This philosophy was based on the observation that people only link to an external website when it offers valueable content for their visitors. At that time, this proved to be an ideal methodology as webmasters could stuff their pages with keywords but had no control on off-the-page factors.

Other search engines had no option but to make room for calculating link popularity in their ranking algorithms and follow the new standards as set by Google.com

Since then, Google has also accomplished major improvements in its breakthrough algorithm to counter the actions of substandard webmasters trying to manipulate off-the-page factors in order to boost their rankings. Of these refinements are discounting the value of links from unrelated websites, from websites within same range of IP addresses, from websites that trade reciprocal links, from websites that are themselves unpopular as judged by Google's proprietary Page Rank scale etc.

Thus, to stay on top, webmasters have to put in more effort in building quality content that search engines value, and searchers are fed with overall better results in their search for online resources. Thumbs up to Google!