While many of us have been tweaking our META tags and refining
our web site copy to improve our search engine standings, our
friends at the search engine companies have been working on means
to make these manipulations less relevant.
Consider the issue from the search engines' point of view. A
search engine's primary function is to take a user's search
request and provide the most relevant results it can, base on the
request. Up to now, the search engines have had little choice
but to trust web masters to accurately depict their content. This
depiction has been accomplished using tags and text and a variety
of algorithms to determine a site's relevancy to particular
keywords. We all know that not every webmaster has been
scrupulously honest in the way they describe their sites
utilizing these "self indexing" tools.
In an effort to reduce the occurrence of these "optimized" (read
"misleading") self indexing techniques, the programmers and
architects who work for the search engines have been burning the
midnight oil. Their focus has been to develop algorithms that
give higher relevance to "off page criteria" -- that is,
information that can be obtained from a source other than your
website.
Enter Alta Vista, the first major search engine to seriously
employ off page criteria in their raking algorithms. Their actual
algorithms are, of course, closely guarded secrets, but they
appear to be utilizing "link analysis" as a heavy weighting
factor for placement.
So what is "Link analysis" and how does it affect my web site's
placement in a search engine's results? Simply stated, link
analysis is evaluating what sites link to yours, who links to
them, link density and what terms are the sites highly to? Clear
as mud, right? Let's look at each of these items in detail:
Link Density
Link density is the term used to refer to how many sites link to
your site. Most are familiar with the idea of a reverse link
lookup. For those that are not, a reverse link lookup is asking
a search engine "How many web sites, other than my own, are linked
to mine?". To perform a reverse link lookup in Alta Vista, type
a simple query like:
+link:www.hotmail.com -host:www.hotmail.com
This query will result in around eighty four thousand pages being
found. This is an outstanding number of web pages, all linked to
Hotmails web site, and a very good example of link density. Now
will your site stack up against Hotmail? Probably not, but you
are probably not in direct competition with Hotmail anyway. To get
an feel for more down to earth numbers, do a search for "web
hosting". Take the first site you find and plug the URL into our
query above. When I did this little test I got nine hundred
sixty nine pages found.
But what if Hotmail decided to go into the web hosting business?
From the standpoint of link density, this would be bad news for
our example company because, based on link density alone, Hotmail
would be nearly eighty seven times more relevant.
Link Popularity
Clearly, link density alone is not enough to make a reasoned
decision about a web sites placement. The next element of off
page criteria to be considered is link popularity. When you are
considering what sites to approach for reciprocal linking,
which would you prefer: A) a link from a site hosted on a free
web host like Angelfire; or B) a link from Yahoo.com? Obviously,
most of us would prefer the link from Yahoo. So we have
determined that not all links are created equal. The algorithm to
analyze link popularity utilizes third level linking to determine
a site's popularity. In other words, the algorithm looks at who
links to the sites that link to you. For off page criteria
algorithms, it is not just the quantity of links but the quality
of the links that counts.
Crosslinking
It's a fact that sites that have to do with a particular subject
have a higher density of crosslinking to other sites that are
relevant to the same subject. This is where the entire concept of
the Internet as the "web" originates. As it pertains to off page
ranking criteria, high density crosslinking indicates a
"cluster". These clusters are assumed to be highly relevant to
the same topics. Take the search keyword "nuclear energy". The
first site listed in Alta Vista is the Nuclear Energy Agency
(NEA). Now do a reverse link lookup on the NEA. Several sites are
listed. Doing reverse link lookups on the listed sites produce
the same sites, over and over again. Therefore sites belonging
to this "cluster" would be determined to be highly relevant to
the search keywords "nuclear energy".
So what do you do about this new direction in search engine
algorithms? My advice is to continue doing what you should have
been doing all along.
Continue to ensure that your title tag is catchy and
appropriate.
Continue to make sure that your description tag is accurate
and that it utilizes your main keywords.
Continue to research and maintain your keywords tag.
Continue to use your keywords early and often in your web
site page copy.
Does this mean you should do nothing different? The answer to
that depends on whether or not you have been soliciting
reciprocal links from similar sites. The recommendation to do
reciprocal links is not a new one, just more important in light
of off page ranking criteria. A few specific recommendations:
Trade links with other web sites that focus on the same topic
as yours.
Identify and get listed in topic specific portals.
Participate in topic clusters, such as web rings.
Use reverse link lookups to track not only your popularity,
but also the popularity of the sites you trade links with.
It is too soon to tell for certain if other search engines will
follow Alta Vista's lead in using off page criteria for
determining relative position. The move will largely depend on
whether the users of search engines feel that these factors
really improve the relevancy of their searches. If Alta Vista's
traffic jumps markedly you can bet your bottom dollar that we
will see a lot more of these algorithms utilized by the major
search engines.
