It’s not easy to find good information on how to rank well in Google. In fact, most of what you’ll hear is conjecture labeled as fact. But if you look around, there are a few documents from Google which can tell you a lot about what it takes to rank well.

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. This would have to be considered the magnum opus of Google search documents, because it was written by the founders themselves and lays out in great detail their philosophy concerning ranking pages. What’s also important about this document is what’s not in it.

Many statements are made about PageRank every day. Here’s what the document says:

We assume page A has pages T1…Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages’ PageRanks will be one.

This would have to be considered the final word, in some ways, because it outlines the mathematic formula in detail. The fun is in guessing what’s changed in the last so many years, but it’s very hard to believe that Pagerank isn’t still very important, regardless of how often it updates on the toolbar.

What about ranking well in Google?

Here’s what Brin and Page said:

Google maintains much more information about web documents than typical search engines. Every hitlist includes position, font, and capitalization information. Additionally, we factor in hits from anchor text and the PageRank of the document. Combining all of this information into a rank is difficult. We designed our ranking function so that no particular factor can have too much influence.

So, as everyone surmises, anchor text and PageRank are clearly a big part of the formula, but the whole game becomes one about guessing which factors, if any, are more important at this particular time for high rankings.

Now, of course, Google has released more information than this document in the last few years, and some of it is contradictory. But you still need to start with this page to begin learning about how to rank high in Google.

It’s still a combination of on-page and off-page factors, as always, but their algo evolves with the web. If you can stay with the times and stay in Google’s good graces, you should be able to do quite well, and last a long time in the rankings.

Related Resources – Must Read For Google SEO Newbies

• Google’s Webmaster Center – which can answer questions for you
• Google Webmaster Guidelines – which detail what’s expected of you to stay on the good side of Google

You must read at least all of these documents to ground yourself in “Modern Google Theory”.

If you have any questions about what you read, let me know. I’m no expert, but I do have a ton of practical experience with Google, so I’d be happy to help.