Amit Singhal explains Google Ranking

Few days ago, Amit Singhal (Google's search researcher) published a post on Google's official blog called Introduction to Google Ranking. The post simply outlined three major factors that Google looks at to determine SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). In my opinion, every webmaster should consider these factors before optimizing their webpages.

According to Amit, Google's "state-of-the-art" ranking system is based on three vital factors:

1. Best locally relevant results served globally
2. Keep it simple
3. No manual intervention

First of all, Amit talked about providing relevant search results to almost all queries. Google wants to make sure that all queries get good search results so that no searcher is left disappointed. However, Google does have search problems and Amit agreed to that. But they have a campaign called "No query left behind" which only motivates them further to do an even better job.

Secondly, Amit discussed the principle of "keep(ing) it simple". Google loves to be simple because that's how people want it to be. Amit talked about how Google has so much work to do when it comes to determine search rankings but nonetheless Google updates approximately 10 ranking changes every week. Their engineers don't play games; they know exactly what they are doing and why a page is ranked the way it is.

Finally, the third factor is "No Manual Intervention." Does Google actually edit the results manually? Amit answered this question by saying that internet is build up of human contribution and so are Google's search results. Google's famous algoritham heavily takes into consideration human contribution in order to decide SERPs. It is not manually determined by Google. Amit also said, that having an algoritham is beneficial since it is easier to make SERPs changes with it rather than doing them all manually if a problem occurs.

Before finishing, Amit mentioned that there will be a follow-up post about Google rankings so stay tuned. And he also concluded by saying, "our passion for search is stronger than ever - and as a search researcher, I have the best job in the world :-)".