 |
 |
 |
|
07.31.09 Understanding How Search Engines Give Valuation To Links  By David HarryHow search engines consider link relevance. A good friend of mine sent me an interesting question a while back, "Dear Dave, can you give me some pointers on how search engines determine link intent?" Well sheeeeit… it's hard to say what constitutes ‘intent' when it comes to various aspects of linking and search engines. It really isn't that straight forward and understanding 'query intent' tends to be the most researched area for search peeps. And as far as patents/papers, I doubt there is really much out there specifically on intent beyond some papers such as; Recognizing Nepotistic Links on the Web Or Detecting Nepotistic Links by Language Model Disagreement and there is more in CJ's post on detecting paid links - there are a whack of papers at the end of that one. Ultimately though… It's all about the spam Most of such valuations (intent) would be in the link spam world as this is where links are evaluated. From that point out, what is actually ‘intent' is defined by the engines themselves. What I mean is that an algorithm can merely look for elements common to those manipulating the index via links, it is up to the engineers to decide what to do with pages/sites above a given threshold. To get some ideas we can look at this Google patent; Document scoring based on link based criteria ...which has stuff such as; Authority entities - one area that can be used to bypass the need to assess value/intent and the potential for link spam is that they will trust authority domains… "It may be possible for search engine (125) to make exceptions for documents that are determined to be authoritative in some respect, such as government documents, web directories (e.g., Yahoo), and documents that have shown a relatively steady and high rank over time. For example, if an unusual spike in the number or rate of increase of links to an authoritative document occurs, then search engine 125 may consider such a document not to be spam and, thus, allow a relatively high or even no threshold for (growth of) its rank (over time)."
Temporal factors - Essentially via link velocity and decay anomalies can be used as a flag for closer inspection - in this case the ‘intent' being to artificially inflate a link profile. "A typical, "legitimate" document attracts back links slowly. A large spike in the quantity of back links may signal a topical phenomenon (e.g., the CDC web site may develop many links quickly after an outbreak, such as SARS), or signal attempts to spam a search engine" From; Historical ranking factors or more specifically; Spam detection using temporal factors. You can also look at this Microsoft patent on temporal link spam detection; Do link spammers leave footprints Anchor text anomalies - A document that has a non-natural rate of growth often has spikes of new backlinks with similar/identical link text associated with it. Documents that show such spikes over time can have the links capped or otherwise devalued. "One reason for such spikiness may be the addition of a large number of identical anchors from many documents. Another possibility may be the addition of deliberately different anchors from a lot of documents." Also from; the Link builders guide to historical ranking factors. Document ranking - search engines may also look at historical ranking levels. This additional signal can be used to detect link intent when combined with other factors; Continue reading this article. About the Author: David Harry is the President of Reliable SEO and has been building and marketing websites since 1998. He can be found writing about search and internet marketing on the Fire Horse Trail and is the author of the SEO Handbook series. http://www.reliable-seo.com http://www.huomah.com http://www.the-seo-handbook |
||||||||
|
| ||
| -- DevWebPro India
is an iEntry, Inc. publication -- iEntry, Inc. 2549 Richmond Rd. Lexington KY, 40509 2009 iEntry, Inc. All Rights Reserved Privacy Policy Legal archives | advertising info | news headlines | free newsletters | comments/feedback | submit article |
