More Than Pagerank Needed To Rank

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As time moves on the search engines are having to continually evolve. In the older days pagerank and anchor text used to be really high on the list of what a webpage needed to rank. Advancing algorithms are now taking in a lot more data to determine the importance and relevance of a webpage in order to put it at the top of the results for any keyword.

There have been some Google search engineers who have come out and said that it is not uncommon for Google to make over 400 adjustments to their algorithm in a year. Even if a person could keep track of what is being changed in the algorithm it would be hard for them to keep their site up to date with all of the changes.

Search is evolving and in a rare appearance by Udi Manber who is a search engineer that has worked with Amazon, Yahoo, and now Google gave a good interview on the evolution of search back in April of 2008. In that interview he answered questions about search, what he has seen, and what he expected then to change in search.

Google has to take in a lot of data in order to improve their algorithm and there are several factors that Google looks at besides pagerank.

Sampling of determining factors.

  • domain name and extension
  • domain age and location
  • domain history and infractions – spam penalties
  • sitewide authority
  • freshness of content – age of content – QDF model (query deserves freshness)
  • locality of website – TLD, hosting IP, content locality
  • user behavior – how users interact with website
  • intent of searcher – same query can mean something different in different locations
  • quality of links – link source
  • and many other factors

When you want to rank a page of a website in the Google serp’s there are a lot of factors taking place and so this type of information can be a little discouraging to some who want to rank pages high. The best advice is to follow Google’s mantra which is to provide the best user experience.

If you focus on your users and accurately label your documents to make it easier for the engine to understand what you are about and your users know what you are about then you will have great success. Overall the content creator should think about how a content user will search that content.

One Response to “More Than Pagerank Needed To Rank”

  1. ZAREMA on 19 Mar 2010 at 7:33 am

    Thanks the author for article. The main thing do not forget about users, and continue in the same spirit.

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