Queries. That's how a consumer finds your website and buys your goods or services. Go to the Google query page, enter the search word 'vitamins' and the Google algorithm does the rest. The Google algorithm (a mathematical formula as secret as US military missile launch codes and the recipe for Coke combined) determines where a particular site will appear on the result pages after a user enters a query. Given that the typical Google user rarely looks beyond the first 10 to 20 sites listed on the results page (i.e., the first page of results), getting your vitamins site listed on that first page of search results would have a terrific impact on your website traffic and, in turn, sales. And, while this may seem an obvious point, many webmasters are oblivious to the on-going changes to the Google algorithm and how these changes affect those all-important Pagerank site rankings.

Google, the proverbial 800 lb. gorilla of search engines, has been tinkering with its algo formulae for years in its quest to bring the most relevant sites to the attention of its users, and as most webmasters know, relevance is in the eye of the beholder. This was one of the flaws in the old early Google algo. It was heavily weighted toward site relevance, which could be easily manipulated by keyword stuffing.

Log on to the outsourcing site, Elance.com, and click through to the writing and translation posts. You'll see numerous examples of webmasters paying $5.00 for 500 words of SEO text. Does it have to be good text? Does it have to be relevant text? No way. Not at a penny a word. This stream of digital garbage simply has to fit the SEO criteria - keyword headers, keyword density, format and so on. The purpose of these 'articles' is not to educate, inform, motivate or inspire. They're developed for one purpose - to increase the number of hits made by search engines like Google and Yahoo.

The Google algo has always relied on a number of weighted factors and while the factors themselves remain unchanged, recent changes to the formula have changed factor weightings. The factors used by Google to determine where your site will appear as the result of a user query include:

Relevance Score - The RS score for your site is determined by such things as keyword density, keywords that appear in titles and headlines, Meta tags, the main body of texts that appear on your site (the corpus), your URL, and other 'search word' elements that appear on your site.

Pagerank - The basis of the earlier Google models. Pagerank has been based on an absolute score assigned to your site based on the Pagerank values of other pages with links to your site divided by the number of outgoing links from your site with other variables such as the damping factor and other 'weight adjusted' considerations.

If you’re a number cruncher and would like to see a best guess at the actual algorithm, click on the link below for some mind-boggling math that you, no doubt, slept through in school.
Hilltop: A Search Engine Based on Expert Documents.

LocalScore - Your site's LS is computed by expert documents. Expert documents are deemed authority sites based on the quality of links both to and from the sites. Google assigns LS values based on search words appearing in the site's title, anchor text and, of course, keyword density, along with the quality of links and anchor text to your site. The higher quality links, the higher your site's LS.

Tweaking Variables - Tweaking Weight Controls (TWC) are used by Google to adjust results based on highly-guarded criteria (though experts in the field have been able to estimate how these controls are used.) The other controls are called dampening controls, again intended for use by Google programmers to fine tune search results based on thousands upon thousands of test queries.

While these basic ranking parameters remain the same, by applying greater importance to one factor over another, the traditional Pagerank model, used by Google for the past few years has changed - along with your site's Pagerank. In some cases, the change in the Google algo will bring forth pages of greater relevance to the user and may, in fact, increase your Pagerank. In other cases, a site's Pagerank can tank due to the changing weights of the ranking parameters.

According to Krishna Bharat of the Compaq, Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California and George A. Mihaila from the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, the estimated changes in the Google Algo are as follows:
Old Google Ranking Formula = {(1-d)+a (RS)} * {(1-e)+b (Pagerank * fb)}
New Google Ranking Formula = {(1-d)+a (RS)} * {(1-e)+b (Pagerank * fb)} * {(1-f)+c (LS)}
where RS represents Relevance Score, Pagerank represents Pagerank and LS represents LocalScore. a,b and c are tweaking variables with assigned values while d, e, and f represent dampening controls, again, another tweaking option to ensure the best, most relevant returns from a user's query.

With a new formula in place and new tweaking variables, it is, indeed, possible that the assigned, absolute value of your site using the traditional Pagerank formula will change your Pagerank - sometimes significantly.

So, how do you, as webmaster, adjust to these changes in the new Google algo? Are the old practices of links and connectivity still useful measures of your site's rank?

Stay tuned. As Google changes its search parameters, every webmaster will have to make adjustments to maintain their hard-earned presence on the world wide web.