NATURAL SEARCH RESULTS.

Google's standard format is to place the natural search results on the left and search advertising on the right. As you can see in this graphic, Google allocates 66% of the real estate to natural search results.

The integrity of the natural search results are the key to Google's popularity. Users trust this algorithm to deliver relevant results. Of course, it is still a computer program, so it might be weak on some searches for some key words, but for the most part, it is the cleanest interface and the most relevant algorithm around.

How does a search engine work?

Search engines are combinations of computer programs. One program called a spider or 'bot' (from robot) follows links and records all the text they find there and then goes to the pages represented by any links they find on that page. As you can imagine, this requires significant processing power and lots and lots of storage.

A second program performs the analysis on all those pages. This program 'indexes' the results and calculates various factors based on the content on the page, and on those pages that link to that page.

A third program compares the natural search results of this month's index to last months and may flag for human intervention various suspicious outcomes. Another program operates the very fast and highly available databases that perform the look ups of results we need. This database changes about once a month, after each of the other steps, and even a quality assurance routine.

As you can see, the effort involved in search engine operations is pretty substantial.

Can you fool Google?

Sure. No computer program is omnipotent (yet). But why would you want to? You'd only be fooling your customers. Probably not a good idea, eh?

Earning credibility in natural search results has to reward visitors with credible content, else users will click and then walk away, instead of value the site and the content you've created. Quality in, quality out. Garbage in... you get the drift.