Search Engines Rank Webpages
Search for anything using your favorite
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.
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
Unlike a librarian, search engines
don't have the ability to ask a few questions to focus
the search. They also can't rely on judgment and past
experience to rank Webpages, in the way humans can.
Intelligent agents are moving in this direction, but
there's a long way to go.
So how do search engines go about
determining relevancy? They follow a set of rules,
with the main rules involving the location and frequency
of keywords on a Webpage. Call it the location/frequency
method, for short.
Location, Location, Location
. . . and Frequency
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 keywords appearing in the title are assumed to be more
relevant than others to the topic.
Search engines will also check
to see if the keywords appear near the top of a Webpage,
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 Webpage. Those with a higher frequency
are often deemed more relevant than other Webpages.
Spice in the Recipe
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.
To begin with, some search engines
index more Webpages than others. Some search engines
also index Webpages more often than others. The result
is that no search engine has the exact same collection
of Webpages to search through.
Search engines may also give Webpages
a "boost" for certain reasons. For example, Excite
uses link popularity as part of its ranking method.
It can tell which of the pages in its index have a
lot of links pointing at them. These pages are given
a slight boost during ranking, since a page with many
links to it is probably well-regarded on the Internet.
Some hybrid search engines, those with
associated directories, may give a relevancy boost to sites
they've reviewed. The logic is that if the site was good
enough to earn a review, chances are it's more relevant
than an unreviewed site.
Metatags are what many Web designers
mistakenly assume are the "secret" to propelling their
Webpages to the top of the rankings. HotBot and Infoseek
do give a slight boost to pages with keywords in their
metatags. But Lycos doesn't read them at all, and
there are plenty of examples where pages without metatags
still get highly ranked. They can be part of the recipe,
but they are not necessarily the secret ingredient.
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, not the least by following
up on complaints.
About High Search Engine Results
First, high search engine results
depend on numerous factors, some of which are outlined
above. Other factors include:
- How competitive your industry is online
and in your region (Real Estate, Careers, etc.)
- How many other Websites are linked
to your Website (the more linked, the higher your site
is in the results)
- What keywords the user is searching
- What text-based content is on your
Website and where it is located
- How your Website is submitted
- How often your Website is submitted
- How to use special code (metatags)
- How not to be avoided by the
search engines as a spammer (such as repeating words
too often on your Website or using the same text
color as your page color to get you higher in the
Secondly, high search engine results
are 50% skill and 50% dumb luck. No one can guarantee
that you can be in the top 10 to 20 results of a search