Question of the Week - How Does Google Rank a Site?

Q: For purposes of a websites organic listing, is it only the content and relevancy of the landing page or does google look at the content and relevancy of the entire website? Do I need to just build out my homepage or do I need to build out the entire website in order to increase my organic ranking?

A: Search engines rank pages, not entire websites as a whole.

The reason many home pages tend to be the best ranked pages on a site is because the authority and pagerank that its gets from the links to it, both external links from other sites, and internal links via the navigation of your own site. So putting aside the (critical) issue of the outside links in to your site, the value you can create by building out other pages on your site is tremendous. You have the benefit of complete control over your internal links, so how you choose to link to other pages in your site via the structure of your navigation, and the link text you use is very important.

Also, you can't expect one page to rank for a large set of diverse keywords. No one page can be the best for every search. So you'll want to write other good content on other pages that are thematically related. If the search engines decide that it is a quality page, then the value of the links back to your home page and throughout the site increase.

And none of this considers what is best for your sites' visitors, and for the goals of your site beyond rankings.


Future implied question raised: What makes a quality page?
How should I link throughout my site?
...to be continued in a future Question of the Week. 

posted by Dave Matson at 8:49 PM