Google Search Ranking Systems
The collection of machine-learning models and filter rules that together decide where a page appears, adjusted thousands of times a year.
Analogy Mental model
A restaurant guide's anonymous inspection panel. It used to be a few men with paper scorecards ticking boxes; now it is thousands of automated inspectors watching the ingredients, the cooking, the customers' faces, and what the neighbourhood says.
In practice What you actually do
Bookmark the official ranking systems documentation and read it before blaming every traffic wobble on an update. Then classify the movement: is the whole site affected, which points at a quality judgement about the domain, or is one page slipping, which usually points at a competitor outranking it.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
There has not been a single algorithm for years. Several systems evaluate content, links, spam, and intent in parallel and their judgements combine, so a diagnosis that names one culprit is almost always a simplification.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →