Why Outranking a Negative Google Result Can Be So Difficult

Many people mistakenly look at Google ranking as a ladder, whereas it is more akin to a horse race that never ends. Although the first ten results on the first page of Google appear evenly distributed visually, there is much more to the ranking criteria that Google’s algorithm uses to determine where the results should appear.

A Google search page also conveys an optical illusion, whenever you search a specific word or term, you see a snapshot of the ranking, as it is that very moment. Google is a writhing organism that is almost impossible to wrestle, let alone control. The snapshot that you see today may change in one hour’s time,  for new publications listed, and for older more seasoned collections of search results, it may only change every week or month, but they do change.

The reason this horse race never ends is because Google is constantly updating its algorithms, and constantly scanning for new content that contains relevant keywords to search. It is for this reason that you cannot afford to neglect to maintain high-ranking for your important search results, if you relax, it could have detrimental effects on the business.

Weighting:

The page-rank and other weighting considerations that Google places on each search result can vary drastically, even for search results only one position apart. If you could open the hood of the Google machine and have a look at the relative weight given to each result, it would almost never look like this:

What Most People Think

Most search engine users believe that ranking is a close race, and might be analogous to a horse race that looks like this, with even spacing between horses:

Google search results, although evenly distributed visually, are almost always not what they seem.

Whereas, in effect it would be more accurate to describe the search results as a long-distance endurance race, kind of like the ones they do in the outback in Australia, where riders often can’t even see each other.

There can be massive gaps between each search result in Google, so for the third horse to catch up to the second, there could be a lot more work than expected due to the large gap in relevance weighting as prescribed by Google.