‘Algorithms’ Category Archive

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Excerpt: The usual way to reach the top of Google’s search engine results is create a site with plentiful, unique content, good links and age. From the search engine’s perspective, there is a dichotomy in displaying results.  New content is likely to contain more spam and could be irrelevant. Older pages are more likely to come from a trustworthy source but in certain circumstances are irrelevent because they are out of date. How do you choose what to show? Query Deserved Freshness (QDF) QDF is an algorithm that analyses the popularity of a search query. It  first came to light when Amit Singhal…

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Excerpt: Twitter is becoming an increasingly popular social media tool. An interesting post on Science for SEO to do with Twitter. Wouldn’t it be great to find out who was an influential member of the Twitter community? Google has an effective algorithm developed by its founders Larry Page and Sergie Brin, known as PageRank. A similar algorithm has been created for the Twitter network, by Daniel Tunkelang called, you guessed it, TunkRank. TunkRank measures your influence in the Twitter world. For those that are familiar with PageRank it uses a similar concept of traversing the directed graph the graph of  follower and…

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Excerpt: The success of a search engine algorithm lies in its ability to retrieving information for a given query. There are two ways in which one might consider the return of results to be successful. Either you can obtain very accurate results or you can find many results which have some connection with the search query. In information retrieval, these are termed precision and recall, respectively. The precision is defined as the fraction of retrieved documents that are relevant. Recall is defined as the fraction of relevant documents that are retrieved.This might seem like the distinction between the Judian People’s Front and…

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Excerpt: Cloaking is the practice of showing a different web page to search engine bots than to your visitors in an attempt to distort rankings. The hope on the part of the cloaker is that the search engine can be shown a rich variety of content which contains the keywords they would like to be ranked for. For example a flash site that sends textual content to the search engines. This is practice is considered to be black-hat and if detected would lead to search engine retribution. So how do the search engines detect cloaked websites? When a search engine indexes…

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Excerpt: Niels Bohr said, “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” I feel that this also applies to the field of search engine optimisation also. It is not an exact science. At best, it can be compared to economics or sociology. Data is noisy, there are lots of theories and everyone has their own opinion. It may be worse, since unlike economics or sociology, how search engines work can be changed without notice. While you cannot argue with results, there are many roads to Mecca. So how…