Everybody who knows computer and internet, should know Google too. If you ask, people will say Google is a search engine. They are right. Google is a search engine but this definition was used to work on 1998 when Google started working in garage in California. Now Google is much more than a search engine.

I have been dealing with Google for many years. Sometimes I introduce myself as a Googlologist . I know Google very well and I was the witness of its fast growing and progressing in all the past 8 years. Google started working on 1998 and in the same year it became listed among the top 100 websites and search engines by PC magazine. When it was still in beta, was answering 10,000 search queries everyday. Google founders claim they have never spent a single dime to advertise Google and Google became well-known just though word of mouth. They are absolutely right. Nobody has seen any advertisement for Google on any media.

Google is growing too fast. When I compare the Google of the 2004 with the current one, sometimes I think it was at least 20 years ago because Google was used to be so different two years ago. Google was used to update its search result every two month. You had to wait for two months to see the Google dance. Google dance was one of the most interesting and also stressful events for webmasters who have been working so hard on their websites popularity. When Google started dancing, sometimes you saw your website at the first page and sometimes you couldn't see it among the top 1000. It was called Google dance.

Two months was a very long interval for updating the database. But now Google updates sometimes several times per week. It has become so hard to see the Google dance because it is so frequent. It is a big progress, really big. After just two years they have become able to make such a big progress. I don't like to talk about their other achievements like their participation in NASDAQ and becoming one of the biggest companies that its stock value is being traded over $400 these days. I don't want to talk about the big and professional team they currently have. I don't want to talk about the specialists who work for Google now. I don't want to tell you that they have even hired the father of the internet who all the webmasters, internet service providers, internet users and ... are in his debt. These subjects are really interesting BUT something which is more interesting for me about Google is the complicated technology behind it.

As a webmaster and internet marketer, you should know what Google is and how it works. You should know how it finds and rank your websites and web pages among billions of other websites and web pages. You should know why some of the websites become banned by Google and why it is almost impossible to be indexed in Google for banned websites. You should know why Google thinks more about searchers and less about webmasters. You should know how Google AdWords works and how you can use it. You should know hundreds of other things if you really want to keep working online and remain a webmaster. Something most webmasters know about Google is not more than what ordinary users know about it and this is like a truck driver who doesn't know how to change a flat tire. So you should educate yourself and know more about Google. You may or may not like it but this is the rule. Google is the biggest website of the internet and those who want to work online and make money though the internet should know, respect and follow its rules and then enjoy the traffic it will drive to their websites and the facilities it has provided them.

How does Google find websites and web pages?

Google finds a website through a special software called spider. The Google is spider is known as Googlebot. Spider finds the websites through the incoming links. Spider finds the links on websites and web pages and follow them to find the target (which can be your website). Spider crawls the target and records what it can find on it in the Google database. I think DMOZ was the first website that Googlebot crawled the first time it started to work. DMOZ is know as the Google directory and Google was used to give a lot of credit to the websites that are listed on it. DMOZ is full of links and can be the best start point for a spider.

So Google finds your website through the incoming links. It means only one incoming link from a website that is already indexed by Google is enough for Google to find your website. This is really correct. Google finds your website even through one link but will your website be ranked at the top of the Google search result page among millions of other web pages? Definitely not. To be indexed is something and to be ranked is something else. If you like your website to be ranked at the first page with the related keywords/phrases, you have to follow some other rules and your website must be eligible for it. Your website must deserve to be ranked on the first page. But how?

One of the most important factors that Google and also most of other search engines consider to rank websites is the number of incoming links. They believe when a website is important and has a good and valuable content, other webmasters will link to it to help their websites' visitors to have access to more valuable resources. So an important website much be ranked higher than the others.

Webmasters easily discovered the importance of the number of incoming links and started creating back links to their websites. A very low percentage of webmasters chose the best way to do that which was adding good and quality content to their websites and encourage other webmasters to link to them just by having valuable content. In fact most of these websites have never asked other webmasters to link to them. Other webmasters just found such websites and linked to them by themselves.

Some of the other webmasters tried to buy links, submit their websites to free for all link farms, exchange links with other websites and write articles that include their websites links and submit these articles to article directory websites.

So Google should decide once again. Should a website that only has higher number of incoming links to be ranked higher OR the quality of incoming links should be considered too?

About two years ago, you were able to have a website ranked on the first page after just two to three months of exchanging links but now it has become almost impossible because Google easily finds out that a website is trying to make a fake link popularity through link exchanging or buying links from other websites and submitting the website link to free for all link farms.

So what should you do?

The best way to create high number of good and quality incoming links to your website is enriching your website with good and valuable content, products and services that encourage other webmasters to link to your website. It is not easy and it is so hard. On the other hand it takes a long time and you can not be sure that if the other webmasters will link to your website or not.

Is there any easier and better way?

There is no better way but there is some easier ways. To improve your website link popularity, you can use a combination of all the techniques. It means you should add valuable and attractive contents to your websites, exchange links with other websites, write and submit articles to article directories, submit your websites to web directories and if you can afford, you can buy text links from other websites. The only technique that has no limitation and the more you focus on it the better result your will get is adding valuable content to your websites. Search engines and specially Google love fresh and original content and their spiders are hungry to find such contents on the websites. So add as much original and quality content as you can to your websites. But be careful not to over-focus on one of the other techniques. So don't just keep on exchanging links or submitting articles and forget about all other techniques. Google can easily find out. For example when more than 80% of the incoming links of a website are reciprocal, it means this website has just focused on link exchanging and so its incoming links are not because of its content and are not because it has valuable and useful products and services. Should such a website to be ranked higher than other websites? Definitely not.

What if more than 90% of the incoming links of a websites to be reciprocal and also the anchor text (link text) of all the links are almost the same and have the same keyword and also most of the links are created within a short period of time? Should such a website to be ranked higher than the others? This website not only will not have a high ranking but will be penalized or even banned. All the main search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN ban such a website.

Google is way above all other search engines to find the ways that is used to promote websites. Other search engines make mistakes and sometimes ban a websites that should not be banned while a website that should be banned is still ranked #1! Google was used to make such mistakes too but I have not seen these mistakes from Google in the past two years.

One day I was talking about Google with my accountant. He said Google makes him surprised because sometimes he searches for a very far and forgotten village in his country and Google gives him thousands of links and pictures. I found out he thinks all the data is entered to Google manually. He really couldn't believe that Google extracts and records the data automatically by using Googlebot which is in fact a software and not a human. This is what most people think and that is why the title of this article is "Is It Better to Say "What is Google" OR "Who is Google"?". Google works in the way that you think you are dealing with a human not a website and not an automatic system.

You may like it or you may not but if you like to use internet and above all, if you are a webmaster or blogger, you have to know and like Google and learn how it behaves, what it likes and what it hates.