I mean, most of the times they become popular in the first place because they show first on Google… no?
In: Technology
Partially, yes, that’s why people Buy Ads to have their website to show up first in google. (And also you have to consider that google doesn’t just show you the most popular result, but also the result that is popular and most closely matches what you searched).
They do it to get more people going to their website.
But otherwise they do it by what websites get the most traffic. And there’s other ways to get traffic than by people finding you through google. Like having a YouTube video with a link to your website at the end, or advertising your website on social media, or really just advertising your website in anyway.
Once upon a time (20+ years ago), the top results on a search engine would be the websites that included your search terms the most times. So if you searched for “reddit”, a website that had the text “reddit reddit reddit reddit” etc. and nothing else would be ranked pretty high.
Then things got a bit more sophisticated, and other factors were included, such as how many times *other* websites links to the ones in your search results. This means that sites like Wikipedia get a high ranking, since they’re referenced a lot.
Other factors have been added with time, but that’s pretty much the gist of it, and the first algorithm Google used was called [PageRank](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank).
Sort of.
Keep in mind Google’s not just scanning that site. It’s scanning millions of other sites. As part of scanning sites, it looks at which sites link to other sites. It assumes if lots of sites are linking to another site, that site is “popular” because people are talking about it.
Google also pays attention to the words used when linking. If I link [click here](http://example.com) I’m not really boosting the popularity of a site. But if I link [cool article about pizza](http://example.com), and Google’s already decided that site is an article about pizza, it decides even more strongly that the article is a good match for “pizza”.
This happens continuously, and new pages getting more new links for keywords are considered “more popular” than older pages not getting as much “buzz”.
(All of this is oversimplified, the Google algorithm is very complex!)
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