Search Engines and Page Ranking

When we submit a query to a search engine, results are displayed in a particular order. Most of us tend to visit the pages in the top order and ignore those beyond the first few. This is because we consider the top few pages to bear most relevance to our query. So all interested in ranking their pages in the first ten of a search engine.

The words you specify in the query interface of a search engine are the keywords, which are sought by search engines. They present a list of pages relevant to the queried keywords. During this process, search engines retrieve those pages, which have frequent occurrences of the keywords. They look for interrelationships between keywords. The location of keywords is also considered while ranking pages containing them. Keywords that occur in the page titles or in the URLs are given greater weight. A page having links that point to it makes it more popular. If many other sites link to a page, it is regarded as valuable and more relevant.

There is actually a ranking algorithm that every search engine uses. The algorithm is a computerized formula devised to match relevant pages with a user query. Each search engine may have a different ranking algorithm, which parses the pages in the engine’s database to determine relevant responses to search queries. Different search engines index information differently. This leads to the fact that a particular query put before two distinct search engines may fetch pages in different orders or may retrieve different pages. Both the keyword as well as the website popularity are factors, which determine relevance. Click-through popularity of a site is another determinant of its rank. This popularity is the measurement of how often the site is visited.

Webmasters try to trick search engine algorithms to raise the ranks of their sites. The tricks include highly populating home page of a site with keywords or the use of meta-tags to deceive search engine ranking strategies. But search engines are smart enough! They keep revising their algorithms and counter program their systems so that we as researchers don’t fall prey to illegal practices.

If you are a serious researcher, understand that even the pages beyond the first few in the list may have serious content. But rest assured about good search engines. They will always bring you highly relevant pages in the top order!

By Manali Oak
Published: 6/5/2008
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