Google is not only the most popular and most important search engine for a webmaster to consider, it is also the search engine with the best tools for investigating your site ranking. Google started as the brainchild of two Stanford University students who wanted a better way to rank websites. They decided to take advantage of the democratic nature of the web and count links as votes with sites that had more incoming links being ranked higher. Their idea turned into Google which is now the most popular search engine, equally for its relevant results, speed, and simple design. Google has been growing in popularity in leaps and bounds, and it also provides secondary results to Yahoo and primary results to AOL, so getting a good Google ranking can bring in large amounts of traffic.
Google's spider is known as Googlebot and is sent out for a mass crawl roughly once a month, though sites that Google detects are being updated very often may be visited more often. Once Googlebot is done it it'll typically take another month for those results to be listed. What usually happens is Google updates their index with the previous results one week, then the next week they'll send Googlebot out. This could change however since it has been publicly stated by Google that one of their goals is to get things indexed withins days or even hours of them going online. Such speed isn't happening now for the most part but if Google starts increasing their frequency between crawls don't be surprised. Google does update some sites more frequently. In addition to the major deep crawls that they run they run other crawls sometimes referred to as "Fresh Crawl." These crawls pick up new content and or newly updated content. Such content is then often listed temporarily and then taken down until the next big update. The idea is to get breaking news stories listed as soon as possible, and then once they become old news to remove them. So if you submit to Google and then get listed for a few days but then lose your listing, do not despair, it is perfectly normal.
While or just before Google updates it's index you can check your new ranking ahead of time by checking one of their secondary servers (www2.google.com, www3.google.com), often while updating Google will repeatedly move it's new index back and forth between the servers. It usually takes a week for things to completely settle down. This back and forth movement has come to be known as the "Google Dance."
Google rankings are highly based on incoming links. The more incoming links to a site the higher it will be ranked. For a more detailed explanation of incoming links see our article "All About Link Popularity and PageRank". Google also follows standard search engine practices of finding keywords in your content, but these keywords alone will not influence your rank, instead they will help you get listed under those keywords. Ultimately your rank depends on incoming links, the context of those incoming links, and on-page features of your site.
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