How Search Engines Deliver Results Pages - Knowing Who to Trust
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When you want to know something about a person, you can do two things: ask the person himself, or ask others who know the person in some way. When search engines size up a website, they have the same two options: check what the site itself says, and check what other sites say about it. Search engines do both. As I already mentioned, because there are so many commercial interests on the web, sites can’t be trusted to be completely honest about themselves. This is why the stuffed meta tags and keyword rich pages that used to do so well in search results before 1998 will now get you banned; search engines have learned their lessons.
Let’s put aside what websites say about themselves for the moment, and remember the point about popularity. If hundreds of thousands of websites link to yours, so goes the theory, it must be popular, and therefore valuable. If those links come from sites that also have hundreds of thousands of links, then that increases the power of the links. Well, that is true to a point. The quality of those links matters. Links from sites that are known to be trustworthy (such as Harvard University, Reuters, the U.S. Department of Justice, and so on) will certainly boost your rank. Links from sites that are known to be low-quality neighborhoods, like “link farms,” will not gain you much, and could actually be a detriment to your standing in the SERPs.
How do search engines know the value of incoming links to your site? They analyze the content of the page that is doing the linking. And this is how Google’s PageRank works; it not only counts a link from page A to page B as a vote by A for B, but it looks at the content of page A to decide how “important” that vote is. In case you haven’t figured it out already, everyone is not necessarily equal in the eyes of a search engine, and “one page, one vote” doesn’t quite wash on the Internet.
Next: How Search Engines Evaluate a Link >>
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