This is a question you may have asked, particularly if you own a business. What criteria are used by the largest search engine to sort results for a particular search? We all know that this ordering can directly depend on the sales volume of a business. In fact, there is no complete answer to this question since part of the used mechanisms are secret and Google does not divulge them. However, there are some known criteria that we will state throughout this article.
Often referred to as backlinks, these are one of the factors that historically have a greater weight in Google's rank of a given site. A backlink is a link, placed on another website pointing to your site. Google sees this as a trust vote for your site, so the more you have, the greater your relevance in the search engine. To better understand this concept, let's look at an example. One author publishes a technical book about architecture and later this book is referred in the bibliography of 10 other books of the same area. This situation reveals that the published book will probably be a good book to read on the subject. It is exactly this principle that Google uses when it favors sites with more backlinks. A backlink is like a reference in the bibliography of another book.
Note that not all backlinks have the same value, as well as not all references in a bibliography of a book have it. A reference in the bibliography of the most popular book of the moment on architecture, does not have the same value of a reference in an unknown book that had a very low circulation. The same is true of backlinks. A backlink in a site with a lot of traffic and popular in a certain theme, is very different from a backlink in a website with almost no traffic.
The frequency of updating a site is also one of the key factors that Google uses to rank the sites. A site that has not had updates for a long time will tend to be hampered by a site with recent updates. Following the example described above, the same applies to a technical book that was edited 10 years ago in relation to one that was edited this year. If a reader is looking for a book in the area, it will probably give the most recent book more priority.
Google believes that sites without recent updates may no longer have the information up to date, the business may even no longer exist and therefore undermines its ranking. For this very reason, many companies are aware of this and leep producing relevant content for their audience, over time. This keeps the interest of potential customers, current customers, and improves their rank in Google.
Another factor that has always shown some relevance when it comes to rank a site by Google is the age of the domain in question. Older domains are often viewed as more trustworthy. Going back to the example of books, it will be like an author who has been writing books for many years, or an author who wrote his first book a few months ago. From the point of view of the reader, the author with a greater history will have more relevance. This criteria is applied the same way by Google, considering that an older site may have more relevance. Note that if the site is old, but has never had updates, this may already be a relegation factor, as described in the previous paragraph.