You probably know Google’s informal company motto “Don’t be evil”. Google is a very successful company that knows a lot about its advertisers and users. In addition, Google has a market share that would allow them do certain things.

What could Google do if they were evil? Note that the following is only hypothetical:

Google could favor its own products and websites

Google could prefer websites from its own services in the search results: websites that run Google ads, websites that use Google’s payment service, Blogger sites, Google Base, etc.

All websites that pay Google in some way could be preferred in the search results while others are downranked.

Google could punish websites at discretion

If Google doesn’t like your website or if someone tells Google that you’re a bad boy then Google can ban your website from the search results without any reason given so it’s so bad for your SEO result.

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Many people who start a website think that it is possible to get high rankings on Google within a few days. Unfortunately, this is not possible. Competition on the Internet is fierce and there are several factors that influence how long it takes until Google lists your website.

1. How old is your website?

If you have a brand new website then you have to wait. You can submit your website to Google but Google will only index your website if other websites link to your site.

In addition, you have to prove that your website is not spammy. Google has several filters for new websites and you have to earn Google’s trust before your website can get lasting high rankings. A new website can get good rankings for less competitive keywords but it usually takes about 6 months to gain the minimum level of trust that is necessary to get high rankings.

2. How optimized was your website before?

If you have an old and established website that was blocking search engine robots due to a broken robots.txt file or a bad website navigation then it can be relatively easy to show up in search engines.

If you remove the factors that keep search engine robots from your web pages then search engines will list your website relatively quickly. Of course, this doesn’t work if you have a new site.

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How does Google find the top keywords of your website?

All major search engines index web pages based on the individual words that they find on the page. If certain words and phrases appear together on the same page, search engines assign a topic that is related to these words to the page.

Google’s patent application indicates that Google might plan to tell you what they believe are the top keywords for your website and let you suggest changes to these phrases.

How can Google find the relation between words?

Google has billions of web pages in its index. If Google finds that many web pages contain both the word “Paris” and the word “Hilton” then Google might assume that these keywords are related. The other words on these pages could give Google a hint that this special word combination is about a woman.

Words that frequently appear very close to each other could get a tighter connection. Google has a lot of algorithms that allow them to calculate the relation between different words.

What does this mean for your website?

Google does not allow you to suggest your keywords through a form yet. That means that you must use other methods to tell Google for which keywords you want to be listed on Google’s result pages. That’s why search engine optimization is so important.

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Does Google use the bounce rate of a web page to specify the position of that page in the search results? What does this mean for your website rankings and what can you do to get a better bounce rate?

What is the bounce rate?

There are two definitions: the bounce rate of your website is the percentage of visitors who see just one page of your website or the percentage of visitors who stay on your site for a small amount of time (only a few seconds).

The bounce rate helps you to measure the quality of traffic that your website gets and it also helps you to find out where your web pages could be improved.

Google’s definition of the bounce rate

The Google Analytics documentation defines the bounce rate as follows:

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