How are Websites Ranked by Search Engines?

If you would have told me a decade ago that search engines would only look at keywords and not the content, I would have agreed with you without the slightest hesitation. But this is not the case in today’s world.  Over time the web has focused more on what’s inside the box rather than what’s outside of it. Though it’s always been stressed that keywords in content is highly important, but now the concept or idea the web page has is proven to be more significant than ever. “A content played full with keywords, but with no concept is similar to washing a dirty jar from the outside.” As I always say.

Indexing and crawling the web

While we discuss about the components of ranking a site or a page, we can’t actually continue without the page being found by the user.

Crawling is the ability of search engines to get around a site, while Indexing is more about actually getting pages into the search engine’s index. Most of the crawling and indexation can be handled with tools supplied by the major search engine like Google or Bing.

Comprehending the signals

Categorization, Geo-localization, behavior, and demographic are some factors of signals used by the search engines. However, these signals aren’t just used for ranking purposes, some are used for quality, and others are processed as display components in the search results. Signals might not be considered in the strictest comprehension of the “ranking factor”, but nonetheless it is an important concept.

You can tell how a search engine utilizes a variety of signals to comprehend what the site or the page is all about and what types of fundamentals are used in scoring search results.

Understanding Graphs

A search engine might employ various classifications, categorizations, relations and correlations which are better known as “Graphs” which is important to understand.

There are Link graphs , social graphs, entity graphs, knowledge graphs, and term and taxonomy graphs each representing authority and trust, connections, names entities, information related to entities. When Google categorizes these relations, re-ranking of web pages occur through these graph relations. A careful introspection of your company has to be surveyed during this process, never fall for plain answers.

Ranking mechanisms

Now we’re getting to the main focus point of how search engines rank pages in today’s online world including, Scoring, Boosting, and Dampening.

Scoring- The scoring over all the algorithms used by search engine makes up the initial ranking of your website. Remember that a search engine uses hundreds of factors boiled into many algorithms.

Boosting- It is obvious that a quick and easy site will ensure more views from users. This is basically what boosting is. Personalization methods use a boosting element that re-ranks results. Boosting is another component that raises a page’s ranking position.

Dampening- A dampening is an element that lowers the rankings of a web page after the early scoring process. Penguin or Panda algorithms are examples of dampening.

The Web Spam correlation

While web spam might cause an increase in your rankings, it can lower or demolish them. It is a term used for those who are looking to exploit the search results. Some of the web spam components might include; cloaking, hacked sites, parked domains, pure spam, unnatural link to a website and from a site. You should always consider what affects the ranking of a web page both from the negative and positive standpoints.

Finally, we’ve reached the final cookie in our tea party, but I’m sure you still don’t have a crystal clear idea about what I just discussed. Frankly, the process of SEO is not that easy to grasp and it is never simple. This is just a user’s manual for you, your quest for more methods of SEO can be broken down into so many branches. We hope this helped in teaching ranking methods of SEO, but feel free to reach out to us at WebitMD Inc. for more information.

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