how search engines work

Search Engines

Search Engines such as google crawl the web daily and make minor changes to positions and listings depending on popularity (backlinks). Once a month google has what is known as a google dance, this is when the entire index on google gets updated to maintain up-to-date listings. The google dance process can take up to a few days to finish indexing each and every listing. It's reasons such as this which makes it important to update your content and keywords monthly. For example, if you have a site with the same page rank as your competitor, but they continuously update their content, and add new pages, while your site remains static, google will consider their site to be more popular and rank them higher in the listings.

The number of backlinks a site has determines it's page rank on google, the higher your page rank, the easier it is to get ranked for the keyword your targeting. There are different types of backlinks which weigh more or less depending on how it's linked to your site. If you were to place a link to a specific site requesting a link exchange, then they link back to you, this will weigh less than if someone were to solely link to your site without placing a link back to them on your site. The reason behind this is google recognizes the linking structure of how your looping back and forth between sites, where as if there's a direct link to your site with out the link back there's no loop and your site gets weighed out more.

Sites with a page rank less than that of your site won't help as much as a website with a greater page rank linking back to you. This is why many of the larger sites out there can place advertising spots on their site and charge a specific amount per click, this will both help your site gain popularity on the search engines, and bring in traffic to help enlarge your audience. The process of developing backlinks is never ending, and you should always try to find as many avenues as possible to develop a higher page rank.