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How Search Engines Rank Web Pages
Search for anything using your favorite crawler-based search engine.
Nearly instantly, the search engine will sort through the millions of
pages it knows about and present you with ones that match your topic. The
matches will even be ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.www.tartoos.com
Of course, the search engines don't always get it right. Non-relevant
pages make it through, and sometimes it may take a little more digging to
find what you are looking for. But, by and large, search engines do an
amazing job.
As WebCrawler founder Brian Pinkerton puts it, "Imagine walking up to a
librarian and saying, 'travel.' They’re going to look at you with a blank
face."
OK -- a librarian's not really going to stare at you with a vacant
expression. Instead, they're going to ask you questions to better
understand what you are looking for.www.tartoos.com
Unfortunately, search engines don't have the ability to ask a few
questions to focus your search, as a librarian can. They also can't rely
on judgment and past experience to rank web pages, in the way humans can.www.tartoos.com
So, how do crawler-based search engines go about determining relevancy,
when confronted with hundreds of millions of web pages to sort through?
They follow a set of rules, known as an algorithm. Exactly how a
particular search engine's algorithm works is a closely-kept trade secret.
However, all major search engines follow the general rules below.
Location, Location, Location...and Frequency
One of the the main rules in a ranking algorithm involves the location and
frequency of keywords on a web page. Call it the location/frequency
method, for short.wwww.tartoos.com
Remember the librarian mentioned above? They need to find books to match
your request of "travel," so it makes sense that they first look at books
with travel in the title. Search engines operate the same way. Pages with
the search terms appearing in the HTML title tag are often assumed to be
more relevant than others to the topic.www.tartoos.com
Search engines will also check to see if the search keywords appear near
the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few
paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will
mention those words right from the beginning.
Frequency is the other major factor in how search engines determine
relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in
relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are
often deemed more relevant than other web pages.www.tartoos.com
Spice In The Recipewww.tartoos.com
Now it's time to qualify the location/frequency method described above.
All the major search engines follow it to some degree, in the same way
cooks may follow a standard chili recipe. But cooks like to add their own
secret ingredients. In the same way, search engines add spice to the
location/frequency method. Nobody does it exactly the same, which is one
reason why the same search on different search engines produces different
results.wwww.tartoos.com
To begin with, some search engines index more web pages than others. Some
search engines also index web pages more often than others. The result is
that no search engine has the exact same collection of web pages to search
through. That naturally produces differences, when comparing their
results.www.tartoos.com
Search engines may also penalize pages or exclude them from the index, if
they detect search engine "spamming." An example is when a word is
repeated hundreds of times on a page, to increase the frequency and propel
the page higher in the listings. Search engines watch for common spamming
methods in a variety of ways, including following up on complaints from
their users.
Off The Page Factors.www.tartoos.com
Crawler-based search engines have plenty of experience now with webmasters
who constantly rewrite their web pages in an attempt to gain better
rankings. Some sophisticated webmasters may even go to great lengths to
"reverse engineer" the location/frequency systems used by a particular
search engine. Because of this, all major search engines now also make use
of "off the page" ranking criteria.
Off the page factors are those that a webmasters cannot easily influence.
Chief among these is link analysis. By analyzing how pages link to each
other, a search engine can both determine what a page is about and whether
that page is deemed to be "important" and thus deserving of a ranking
boost. In addition, sophisticated techniques are used to screen out
attempts by webmasters to build "artificial" links designed to boost their
rankings.www.tartoos.com
Another off the page factor is clickthrough measurement. In short, this
means that a search engine may watch what results someone selects for a
particular search, then eventually drop high-ranking pages that aren't
attracting clicks, while promoting lower-ranking pages that do pull in
visitors. As with link analysis, systems are used to compensate for
artificial links generated by eager webmasters.www.tartoos.com
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