How Does Google’s Algorithm Work?

As casino affiliates who market online casinos in a very crowded market place we often wonder how Google’s algorithm works. In this article I’m going to explain just this.

The Google Algorithm

When you do a quick search on Google a list of ten results appears on your screen. Chances are they are relevant, popular pages that answers the questions you were looking for. They are written by people who are experts on a certain topic and at the same time they provide a fantastic user experience.

Behind Google’s algorithm there’s a formula which takes a myriad of factors into account. To most of us it might seem like a quick instant algorithm but it’s not. If you abide by Google’s quality guidelines the search engine will provide you with a constant flow of people collectively known as traffic. How can you increase your website’s visibility? This can be done by advertising your business, starting a blog or you can get revenue by just advertising or selling your product on your website. However, it’s far easier said then done.

To achieve this, you must be able to rank your website high in Google for certain phrases knows as keywords. Without Google your website will not be seen by anyone, sad but it’s the truth. Even though Google’s algorithm is shrouded in secrecy, the world’s top SEO experts have discovered the factors that the search engine uses when ranking portal casinos. I might add many casino webmasters believe that Google uses a different algorithm to rank their sites as opposed to sites outside their niche.

How Does The Search Process Work?

Once your website is online. The Google bots arrive on to your website. To index content (web pages, files, documents, videos and other media), Google sends the ”crawlers”, ”spiders” or ”bots” to do the job and to crawl the web non-stop for indexing. In other words the crawlers tell the search engine what they can access from your website and index accordingly. If it’s an in-depth article about ”Guide to playing baccarat online”, you should be ranking for search terms like ‘baccarat’ or ‘baccarat house edge and so on’.

Indexing is important since it determines what appears on the search engine results. However, you can control what the Google bot can access from your website. The path that the search engine bots use to crawl and index sites is through links. In turn these links provide the bots easy access to the billions of content that’s available on the Internet.

It’s also through links that the search engine bots will find your pages, read the code, store information found in your pages for later retrieval as the search need arises. In order to store the information, search engines have data centers across the globe. They are home to countless machines that process all the information crawled and indexed by the bots. This also explains why online users searching for content can see the results immediately. The other main purpose of the search engines is to respond to search queries. Users connect to the World Wide Web searching for information through search engines. How they show up in the search results depends on two factors:

• They must be relevant and useful to the users’ queries.
• They are ranked to relevance as the search engines see it.

The search engines display the search result queries based on the perceived relevance. They then display clickable links that will bring the users where they can find answers or solutions to their queries.

How To Get More Visitors With Content

It goes without saying that traffic is important. If your website’s content is well-written and researched, Google more than any other search engine will bring it to you. The best way to bring in quality traffic is to start a blog and to write about your niche. For example, if you write about the latest internet gambling trends, not only will you begin to rank for your root domain but for the other pages on your site as well.

What Are You Ranking For?

Before I continue I’d just like to point out that Google knows exactly what your site is all about. If you write an article on ‘How to play Blackjack‘, Google already has a ranking list that encompasses each term within this niche. Your website will be ranked on several factors. It could be high or low. Since the online gambling niche is extremely competitive, thousands of webmasters are competing for the same money keywords. What may seem as a peaceful list of websites is in actual fact a war zone between various companies.

That being said, instead of hiring a SEO consultant you can do the work yourself and at the same time save thousands of dollars. SEO is easy to learn and to apply, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to do it. The great thing about the Internet is that you can compete with anyone. Google’s indexing bot does not care whether you’re Bill Gates or Sheldon Adelson. At the end of the day it’s all about the great content you provide and the keywords you target.

Ranking Factors

Why do some portal casinos rank better than others? There are more than 200 ranking factors Google takes into account when ranking a website. Let’s start with the most obvious one, keywords. Before you start a website or begin writing an article you must assign the proper keywords first. Once you’ve drafted a keyword mind map, you must write in-depth articles on them and sprinkle them throughout your content.

If you’re writing ‘How to choose a deposit bonus‘, then you’ll also begin to rank for ‘deposit bonuses’, ‘ wagering requirements’ and so on. Basically keywords aren’t really a factor where you stand in the rankings but they do tell Google which words you are ranking for. Some keywords such as ‘online casinos’ are virtually impossible to rank for.

Picking keywords is a fine art, more of a strategy if you will. Where exactly do you place the keywords in your article you want to rank for? They must be placed into the URL (uniform resource locator), title, meta description (the description below the title), in the content itself and in the sub-headings.

Page Rank

What is Page Rank? Each website is assigned a rank in Google that’s on a scale of zero to ten. Once your site becomes established, it will receive backlinks from other websites within your niche. What is a backlink? It’s an organic link to your page from another website. The more quality backlinks you have the higher your website will rank within the serps. When another website links to yours, it passes some of its Page Rank or link juice on to yours.

If a dodgy forum site linked to your content and has a PR of zero, chances are pretty good that your website’s ranking will drop. However, if Wikipedia, a university or government website linked to your website and it has a PR 6 or 7, your site will receive a major boost. The reason for this is simple, once Google sees that authority sites are beginning to link to yours it sees your site as an authority too. Page Rank is not as important as it once was.

Don’t Use Blackhat SEO

What is blackhat SEO? It exploits loopholes within Google’s search algorithms to artificially manipulate its rankings. It’s where webmasters buy hundreds if not thousands of links from other link farms just to boost their PageRank. Thankfully Google has caught on to this and introduced the dreaded Panda and Penguin algorithms. Any website guilty of gaming the system will be punished severely.

With the introduction of Panda, thousands of blackhat companies closed down shop. In fact, 20 percent of the world’s websites got hit by Panda.

Conclusion

Your website or blog must be working well on the technical side. In other words not only must the content be well written but it must encompass various factors holistically. If your site offers a good user experience, it’s mobile responsive and it’s well structured it will rank well in Google. Google is the king of search engines and continues to dominate the search engine world today. The primary reason for this is because of its incredible algorithmic formula.

Google’s algorithm is superior simply because it gives users what they search for in the search results page. However, this is not always the case, especially in the online gambling niche. Many sites that dominate the serps are often hacked sites and it takes a while before Google catches on. It also received a lot of flack from top SEO’s since it previously stated that its core algorithms, Panda and Penguin automatically run without the need of manual updates-this is not the case.

It’s safe to say that irrespective of all the negative publicity Google received of late, webmasters and site administrators are still trying to gain top positions in Google’s serp. They optimize their websites not only to increase their visibility but to earn more revenue too.