How does Google create their Page Rankings?
When most of a company’s revenue is generated online- a trend developing across many companies in todays society- it is essential for the firm to maximize the Page Ranking that it receives on big search engines like google. A page rank is hugely important to companies like this since it plays a large role in determining your online success. If your page is not one of the top search outputs, then you will be buried by the masses of other pages that appear. This results in less exposure to your website and your product, which will then lead to a decrease in revenue.
Since having a good page rank is essential for the success of a web based company, companies have an incentive to be placed higher up in page rankings. Therefore, there exists heavy competition between companies for these top spots. The top spots are earned to some extent based on page quality, but they are also bought from google, and the prices are determined by page quality along with supply and demand for page rankings. This competition gives rise to a market for page rank spots which google has the power to regulate. Google has an incentive to use their search engine to give users the content that will be relevant to them, so the quality of a page will be a large factor in determining how much you would have to pay to secure a desired ranking.
Google considers a wide range of factors, anything from keyword matching to page loading speed to maintenance of a site to page connectedness, along with nearly 200 other ranking factors. Google has not officially released their ranking system, but many individual bits are known about the system. The system is meant to come up with a page ranking system that will assign natural page ranks fairly based on content, and create an accurate representation of the market so that google can maximize its revenue based on price offerings for spots arising from these original rankings.
Say, if a website has a lot of inbound and outbound links, it is likely more important and therefore will be placed higher in the rankings. This means that it will receive a higher ranking relative to a page which isn’t as well connected, given that neither bids on a spot. However it also means that the connected one will need to pay less to reach a desired spot relative to the other page.
A company will also have a value that a given rank is worth to it. This should be based on the number of clicks that a page ranking receives as well as the value in revenue that is expected to be procured from a click. This essentially leads to a game of the supply and demand with google nudging prices for each specific page up or down based on its desires for a page to be seen less or more.
Cite used…
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/google-ranking-algorithm-infographic