How the Ranking Works - Google uses a number of elements to decide whether a Web page is a good match for a particular search. First, it looks at links. Links from one Web page to another don't appear spontaneously; people have to make themin effect saying, "Look here and here and here." Because each link thus represents a decision, Google infers that a link from one page to another is tantamount to a vote for the second page. Pages with lots of votes are considered more important than other pages. For example, if a million baseball-fan Web sites all have links to MLB.com (home of Major League Baseball), Google's logic is, "Hey, that's an important site for people searching for the word baseball."

In addition, Google ranks the pages that cast the votes, based on their own popularity, and gives more weight to the votes from heavily linked-to pages. Finally, Google uses this information to assign Web pages an appropriate PageRankGoogle's term for statuswhich it calculates on a scale from one to ten.

But all that jazz would lead to nothing more than an interesting hierarchy of Web popularity if it didn't take into account the words you're searching for. So when you query Google, it combines PageRank with an additional system for matching textwhich looks not only at the content on a first layer of pages, but at the content on pages linking to themto produce a list of pages that is, more often than not, relevant.

In all, the Google equation, or algorithm, incorporates 500 million variables looking at everything from links to the position of your search terms on a page. And most searches run in much less than a second.

Because the site's methods are so complex, it's toughthough not impossibleto jigger a page in order to improve its rank in a Google search.

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