Google’s Matt Cutts on How Google Search Works (from 2010)

I happened to notice a very timely video from Google in light of the new Hummingbird update.

It’s Matt Cutts giving a simple explanation of the basics of how Google’s search engine works including how Its spiders crawl the web following links.

Matt then explains how Google decides which files in its index get ranked in the search results – How they evaluate some 200 factors including –

• How many times keywords and synonyms appear on the page.
• Does the keyword appear in title? In the url?
• Then they look at whether the page is from a high quality or low quality site.
• Next, what’s the page’s PageRank (which Matt explains).
• Finally they derive an overall score for this and every page in the index.

We’ll have to see how the new Hummingbird algorithm changes the specifics and the importance of these factors over the coming months and years especially the affect on keywords, such as how many times keywords and synonyms appear on the page.

For much more on the Hummingbird update see “Is SEO Keyword Optimization Dying? Google’s Keywords “Not Provided” And Hummingbird Update“