Rankings - How are Search Results Listed?
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Are the First Results Always the Best Results? When you send a query to a search engine do you assume that the first results listed will be the most relevant? Do you persist and look beyond the first few pages of returns? Market research indicates that 85% of casual search engine users don't go beyond the first page of results. This makes webmasters and marketing experts very interested in placing their sites in the first 10 returns of a search engine. Understanding the mechanics of this relevancy placement will help you evaluate the quality of the results, and may make you more determined to dig beyond the top 10. Every search engine strives to return relevant web pages that will satisfy your requests. Each search engine uses a proprietary 'ranking algorithm' that attempts to instantly build a list of highly appropriate responses to your query. Since each search engine applies its own formula to a unique database of information, results and relevancy rankings will always vary from search engine to search engine. (This is one reason serious searchers always consult multiple search engines.) |
All search engines use the same basic ingredients to determine relevancy, it's just the mix that varies. The keywords of your query start the process. All ranking algorithms consider how often keywords appear in a document (frequency). They also measure keywords in relation to each other within a document (proximity). Another measure considers the location of keywords in a document. Keywords occurring at the beginning of a page, in the titles of pages, and in the URLs of the pages, are all given more 'weight' as relevancy is determined.
Another important element is the website's link popularity ranking. Many search engines, most notably Google, consider links to a web page as a vote of confidence and popularity. The number of links to a resource then becomes a major factor in determining relevancy. It is assumed that a page that is linked to by other sites has been judged valuable and worthy. The greater the 'link popularity', the higher the potential relevancy of the site. Extra weight is assigned if the pages linking to the resource also have 'link popularity'.
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