‘Search Engine Results’ Category Archive

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Excerpt: Introduction The PageRank algorithm is a global ranking metric used to determine the overall quality of a page. The Hilltop algorithm determines the quality of a result based on the relevance to the query term. The original paper is available. The algorithm overcomes problems with broad search terms which return large sets of documents that have to be ranked by checking them against expert sites are derived from the terms in the query. An expert site is be one which has many one-way links to other expert sites. Affiliated sites are discounted. (Sites are deemed affiliated if they share the…

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Excerpt: When we type a query into a search engine such as Google, how many of us think about what goes on behind the scenes? Any SEO specialist ought to have a basic understanding of how your query gets transformed into a list of results. In the early days of the web, a search engine consisted of a list of a few thousand sites. There were so few websites that it was enough just to list pages of all the sites found by a simple crawler. With the explosion in the number of websites after 1994, the task of indexing the web…

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Excerpt: If you have been signed into your Google account you will notice that there are some strange graphics that appear alongside the search results.

[/caption] These are what Google calls the SearchWiki and it give users the power to personalise their search results either by promoting chosen results and hiding and removing others. Using content can be given more prominence in the SERPs by clicking on the arrow. Results can even be flagged is irrelevant and removed from the search results. Such interaction with the search results could prove useful if you believe the…

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Excerpt: In the last post, we talked a bit about the Magestic SEO link analysis site. It gets its data from their own search engine known as Magestic-12. This project started in 2004 and uses distributed computing much like the SETI@home project which analysed data from the Arecibo radio telescope looking for signs of intelligent life in the universe. The main advantage to the distributed computing element of the search engine is that it can crawl the web faster and update its index more frequently. Volunteers can download software that turns their machine into a search engine node. Allowing it to…

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Excerpt: Introduction According to a study made by Opera [1], only around 4% of the web is using valid (X)HTML. This is a surprising result as it is usually fairly simple to fix. Browsers can correctly determine some errors and work around them such as the odd missing paragraph tag and so on. With SEO every factor can make a difference in the ranking so it is important that you give you page the opportunity to be ranked. If you do not do use valid code, there is a possibility that your code may be misinterpreted by the search engine spiders and the…