The most common method of finding new jewellery wholesalers online is to use traditional search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN. If you know what you're doing, and how to interpret the search engine results, then this can be a very effective method. But in order to get the most from these results, you need to understand a little about how Google chooses which sites appear on the first page.

Google does not care about the quality of jewellery on offer on a particular website. It does not care about how cheap or expensive that jewellery might be. And it does not care about how extensive or limited the company's online catalogue is. When you enter a search query such as "wholesale costume jewellery" or "wholesale jewellery" into Google, it returns websites that it feels meet the requirements of your search phrase, and it does this without understanding the words you typed in.

How does Google measure quality?

An entire industry has grown up to help websites give Google what they think it wants in order to position a site as close to the top of the front page as possible. The methods used to help ensure a high ranking are: obtaining as many incoming links from other websites as possible (often directory sites that human beings never read), writing the text of the website so that a certain percentage of the content contains important key words and phrases (making the page a chore to read if you are a human being), and choosing a domain name that contains those key words rather than using the company's registered business name.

One other factor that plays into a website's Google ranking is the age of the website. A wholesale company whose website went live 10 years ago will probably rank better than the websites of new wholesalers, even though the older company may be selling out of date lines of jewellery, or may not even have an online shop at all.

What this means is that a wholesale jewellery company can climb the Google rankings and appear at or near the top of the first page of results for important search phrases, while at the same time having a limited range of stock, of poor or unimpressive quality, and at prices that are far from competitive. The company may even have ceased trading months ago, but so long as the website still exists, so too will its high ranking with Google.

What does this mean for retailers trying to find wholesalers online?

It means that you cannot assume that the first page of results returned by search engines is any indicator of the quality, size, or professionalism of the wholesaler. All you can draw from these results, is that the websites listed have paid a lot of money to optimising companies to help reach the top, that the website has been around a good long while, or that through their use of keywords on their web pages they have struck lucky.

Now, this is not true in all cases. Occasionally a good wholesaler with excellent stock will reach the front page of Google. But you cannot rely on this. You should never stop at the first page of results. In many cases, continuing on to pages two, three, and four will yield far better results. Most people do not do this, which means that most retailers fail to discover the jewellery wholesalers lurking on page two or three of Google, and make their buying decisions based on those often inaccurate first page results.

Don't make this mistake.