How does Google work?
 

Just wondering how does google ranking work? Is it based on popular hits? Can one pay google to be placed on the top of the search rankings?

Are the third party companies that promise that your keywords on your site will be on the top of the search rankings actually just hitting your site a lot or do the third party companies actually pay google?

You can pay to get in the sponsored links section at the top or the ads on the right. Otherwise you can't pay to get there.

One simple test--are the companies in question at the top of the list when you search for them? My attempt produced a sponsored link but the rest of them weren't such sites. Conclusion: It doesn't work.

Some answers to your questions can be found here.

slightly O/T: one of the coolest features on google is answers.google.com

also be sure to check out labs.google.com

have fun! :D

labs.google.com is amazing! they don't talk about all those cool thigns enough!

Here's a technical article on how Google does its page ranking.

:rolleyes:

another technical article on pagerank

Thanks for all the technical reading.

So it looks like one cannot pay google to rank their page at the top. So does that mean 3rd parties who say they can do that for you actually hit my pages many times to increase our page rankings?

And they get other pages to link to you. Lots of pages linking to you give you a better ranking:

You might check to see if the number of other sites that link to your URL has decreased. This is the single biggest factor in determining which sites are indexed by Google, as we find most pages when our robots crawl the web, jumping from page to page via hyperlinks. To find a sampling of sites that link to yours, try a Google link search.

You can buy your way to the top. Pay per click.

hence link spamming (like when you search for say a camera, and find a bunch of near-identical sites like buy-gadgets-now.com, camera-store-1.com, get-cameras-here.com)

looks like google has managed to dilute the effect of link spamming, but it's still a factor