? For You SEO Guro's

[Licker4U]

If two hotels had identical web pages with identical text, identical amenities, number of rooms, etc., only thing different is the name of the hotels, how would Google determine which one would be ranked higher?

[Jim]

The length of time online? Or if that is the same maybe alphabetically? :)

[hony]

How much it "trusts" the site? That's a fuzzy concept but things like age of the site and whether it gets links from other trusted sites would surely help.

And no, PageRank probably has little to no influence. :)

[Bill]

The "quality" of the links pointing to each respective website.

It's a fairly straightforward concept, but how google assigns quality is much debated.

[hony]

Indeed so... Apart from a few people at the Googleplex we are all guessing. But some people do seem to feel extremely strongly that their guesses are better than others. :)

[HarryM]

whoever has the most h1 tags

it's true, i read it on a forum

[spacemanspiff]

The one that buys Adwords :D

Seriously, probably what Bill said. The quality and relevance of the backlinks.

[Licker4U]

The "quality" of the links pointing to each respective website.

It's a fairly straightforward concept, but how google assigns quality is much debated.

I was thinking no back links and only links to internal pages, time on line the same, everything being equal. My guess would be alphabetically but Google wouldn't allow that because that could be found out in time. Where's Matt Cutts ? Isn't he the Google guru?

[Bill]

I was thinking no back links and only links to internal pages, time on line the same, everything being equal.

If you follow strict theory, then, by definition, neither site could or would appear in google.

Because only a site that is linked to from another site can be found by the spiders, and therefore has enough value to be included in the database.

(There's one technicality - google ranks "pages", not "sites" - so, if the spider did find the site...)

You're going to say, no, it's been submitted to google. Then you have to believe that submitting to google has function anymore. Some people might believe that. I don't know or care, and haven't even seen the google submission page in years.

In practice, I have no idea, and the situation is too artificial to be of any practical application.

Personally, since the sites are identical except for one insignificant checksum number, and unspiderable, I think google would not include either in the database. There are thought to be billions of pages that aren't databased.

[arturobraganza]

If two hotels had identical web pages with identical text, identical amenities, number of rooms, etc., only thing different is the name of the hotels, how would Google determine which one would be ranked higher?

Depends if which of the two are well-optimized. But it depends on how many related links or keywords for one site.