| Fiction: | Advertising on Google affects my rankings in the search results. |
Fact: |
Advertising with Google neither helps nor hurts a site's rankings in Google. |
| Fiction: | Joining a link exchange or "free-for-all" link program will boost my rankings. |
| Fact: |
Linking schemes will often do a site more harm than good. Many sites that advertise link-sharing programs not only offer little value, but will distribute your email address without your permission, resulting in an increased volume of unwanted mail. |
| Fiction: | Automated "rank checking" programs are a good way for webmasters to save time and measure their online presence. |
| Fact: |
Automated rank checking programs violate Google's Terms of Service. They use server resources that should be spent on answering user requests. We strongly request that you not use rank checking programs to check your position on Google. |
| Fiction: | A competitor can ruin a site's ranking somehow or have another site removed from Google's index. |
| Fact: |
There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. Your rank and your inclusion are dependent on factors under your control as a webmaster, including content choices and site design. |
| Fiction: | A website will be removed from Google's index if it's "over-submitted." |
| Fact: |
We don't require submission nor do we penalize sites for "over-submission." You're free to submit as often as you wish. However, given the nature of our inclusion process, your time is better spent improving the content and links of your site. |
| Fiction: | Sites aren't included in Google's index if they use ASP (or some other non-html file type.) |
| Fact: |
At Google, we're able to index most types of pages and files with very few exceptions. A sampling of the file extensions we're able to index includes: pdf, asp, jsp, html, shtml, xml, cfm, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri, swf, cfm, and php. |
| Fiction: | Using a particular type of web server such as Apache or IIS will benefit a site's rankings. |
| Fact: |
Google does not distinguish between different web server types in our rankings; use whatever type of web server is best for your situation. |
| Fiction: | If my pages load slowly, that will hurt my site's rankings. |
| Fact: |
How fast a page loads does not affect its ranking. However, if your web server or connection is down or causes a page fetch to fail, that page won't be indexed. |
I'm puzzled by my site's ranking.
1. How Google ranks pages.
Google's order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including our PageRank algorithm. Please check out our Technology Overview page for more details. Due to the nature of our business and our interest in protecting the integrity of our search results, we limit the information we make available to the public about our ranking system.
2. My page's location in the search results keeps changing.
Each time we update our database of webpages, our index invariably shifts: we find new sites, we lose some sites, and sites' ranking may change. Your rank naturally will be affected by changes in the ranking of other sites. No one at Google hand adjusts the results to boost the ranking of a site. The order of Google's search results is automatically determined by many factors, including our PageRank algorithm, and is described in more detail here.
You might check to see if the number of other sites that link to your URL has decreased. This is the single biggest factor in determining which sites are indexed by Google, as we find most pages when our robots crawl the web, jumping from page to page via hyperlinks. To find a sampling of sites that link to yours, try a Google link search.