Technical level: Basic/Beginner || Date: 31st October 2002 || Author: Nigel Peck

The meanings of abbreviations related to this topic can be found at the bottom of the page.

First a little background about Google. Google is currently the most popular Search Engine (SE) on the Internet. Statistics say anywhere between 50 and 80 percent of searches are done on Google. This is not to say that things will always be this way but for the time being Google is very important.

Armed with this information it goes without saying that any Internet Marketing strategy, whether SEO or CPC/PPC needs to take Google very seriously.

Google works by "spidering" or "crawling" web sites. Once this is done the sites can be added to the Google "index". You can think of the index as being similar to a phonebook, it's Google's (massive) list of pages on the Internet.

Google then performs various operations on the information it has collected and ultimately decides where each page will appear on it's list of results for searches.

The Google update is the time when Google starts using a new index for it's search results.

The Google updates happen once a month at present. It takes a few days and is very important, as it is the time when your listing in Google changes, for better or for worse.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations related to this topic:

SE
Search Engine
SEO
Search Engine Optimisation
SES
Search Engine Strategies
SEM
Search Engine Marketing
CPC
Cost Per Click
PPC
Pay Per Click
CPM
Cost per Thousand
Advanced Information
For advanced technical information about Google please see the following articles:

A Survey of Google's PageRank,

Google Dance.

Related Pages
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