How exactly do search engines select which sites to display first?
This is the million-dollar question. Since Google’s primary service is their search service, the quality of their results is perhaps their most valuable asset. If they were to disclose their ranking algorithm, unscrupulous webmasters would invariably use the knowledge to secure top positions for all sorts of keywords. In the end, this would diminish the quality of the results, and Google would lose its pre-eminence in the world of search. As a result, Google’s algorithm is a tightly held secret.
