Understanding the nature of Google can be quite a daunting task. Clients ask frequently why it takes so long to see good results in Google, and why it can often times can be near impossible to achieve a top 10 ranking for a highly competitive keyword on the world's largest search engine.
Does Google focus on popular sites? The answer is simple. Google makes friends with the popular people (used in metaphor to represent websites). Google does not care about the new kid in school. Essentially, Google has built its spidering, indexing, storing and retrieval methodology economics around the popularity of the web. If you always hang out with popular people you will always be popular….and it's just that simple.
Why should Google spend time and money to aimlessly spider the entire web? I don't know about you but I'm sure not paying them to index my results. Why should they have to pay bandwidth, storage, and technology costs to spider everyone all the time? Do you pay their bills? Google spends its time worrying about the popular kids in school…they could care less about the new kid. Until you make friends with other popular kids consider yourself invisible.
Some people ask us how this relates to PageRank ("
PR"). As most of us know these days it's not just about the level of
PR you carry or how big the
PR is of the site that may link to you. It's about the credibility and ACTUAL
PR of the sites. Having high volume of links is crucial as well.
In other words, it's very easy to pump a sites
PR up to a 6 or 7. This however, does not help your rankings if the sites linking to you are other "pumped" up sites. Sites which have achieved high
PR naturally are much more valuable.
In regards to the economics of Google they will however give your site more attention in the way of spidering if you have a
PR or 5 or higher. Sites with PR7 and PR8 often enjoy updates every 24-48 hours. This is critical for eCommerce sites with a lot of pages.
When buying your friends (buying links) people should be careful about where they buy. Some sites get filtered for selling links. Some friends are bad friends. Other sites sell true text advertising, and have been doing so for years, and are therefore much more legitimate sources to purchase text link advertising from. When buying text links seek to buy in good neighborhoods and networks; specifically, look for offers that serve your site well from a true advertising standpoint, and are not there just to help you with PageRank and link popularity.
To capsulate this article I hope to leave you with one specific message: "Google will only recognize you when you become popular - link farms and over reciprocation will only work short term and can get your site penalized. Build a foundation of true resource sites for reciprocation, and create strong alliances in your corresponding industries for strategic partnerships to aid in your link popularity. This is the only want to become popular and achieve high rankings in Google's SERP's."
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