How Google ranks - Interesting Thoughts.

Imagine the following:

You go on Google and type "Curry recipes", and up in the top results come several Internet Marketing sites because they feature an article about "Curry Recipes" somewhere...

Imagine you enter "Insurance" in Google, and the top position coming up is an entry at Oprah's site where she is giving some advice about life insurance.

Or you enter "SEO" in Google....how high is the chance that a myspace site is coming up featuring someone on myspace whose site is on SEO?

--> WILL NOT HAPPEN!

On one of my own sites (SEO, Affiliate Marketing related) i noticed i can rank pretty well with related keywords and content..IM stuff and reviews, adwords, keyword research. But how high is the chance that i put an article on my SEO BLOG which i could optimize for "The best Cooking Recipes"? --> ZERO

The thought behind this is that Google gives a site an authority in regards to a certain theme -this "authority" does not have ANYTHING to do with pagerank, by the way. Regardless whether your site has PR0 or PR7 - there must be a classification scheme which Google uses to attest relevancy to your site, and therefore hypothetical ranking potential in regards to content (like an article.)

I want to find about the criteria how Google gives sites such relevancy,which makes one site rank well for one subject, but not for another.

The questions here are:

-) Does Google "scan" a site and collect information, keywords and the overall theme and puts the site into a category, of some kind?

-) Or does this happen dynamically, eg. simply based on the fact how keywords will rank for a particular site, over time.
Example: Google doesn't really "know" about what a site is actually about, but in time the traffic and keywords, the ranking is what creates authority by itself...without google having a "record" of the site *per se*?

I was pondering those questions yesterday because there was this interesting WSO recently where the method is to analyse a site using ALEXA...analyze the keywords which drive traffic to a particular site.

For example: Squidoo, Ezine, Hubpages etc.

The theory behind this system is to assume that it is easier to rank on such a "general" web2.0 site (eg. ezine, squidoo etc.) using content which is targeted and optimized around such "high traffic keywords".

Example: An alexa keyword analysis would yield that Squidoo gets indeed MOST of its traffic for the keyword "mafia wars cheats". You can also check in Google, a Squidoo lens on the subject is indeed #1 for the phrase "mafia wars cheats".

Thought again:

In my opinion there is no doubt that Google gives sites an authority in regards to a subject, but this is not clear to me for general sites which can have ANY kind of subjects, like Squidoo or Ezine.

So does the fact that Squidoo ranks #1 for "mafia wars cheats" (plus lots of traffic going to Squidoo for this keyword) make Squidoo an "authority" on this subject?

Or does Google maybe give such "theme-authority" to some sites, but leaves those social web2.0 sites "neutral" with the potential that ANY subject *could* rank mediaum-high on them? (But never really OUTRANK a real authority site? Otherwise we would see myspace, hubpages, ezine occasionally outrank established "authority" sites - but this is hardly the case!)

In that vain also the thought that for a desired future high ranking of a keyword the best strategy is indeed to build a authority site first (eg. a wordpress blog) tightly around some topic, say "SEO". Then let the site establish itself, put content on it frequently. Sooner or later Google thinks that the site is highly relevant and the ranking possibility for a SEO subject is WAY higher than simply making a blogger blog about the same subject and hope that the blogger blog would rank! (Which it very likely wont)

And i am still debating whether according to that system with the keyword research using Alexa it would really be EASY now to rank on Squidoo for "mafia wars cheats" because Squidoo became an authority for this...so it must be easier to rank?!