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What is Link Popularity? Websites that are 'linked to' by other websites are said to have 'link popularity'. This concept is fundamental in the Google Pagerankª algorithm. Google considers each link to a web page a market driven vote for the website. The more links to a website, the more votes and the higher the Pagerankª that site achieves with Google. However just being linked to by a large number of other websites won't guarantee higher placement on Google. The popularity of the page displaying the link is also given weight. If the page linking to a website is also highly popular, the Pagerankª of the linked to site improves even more. By contrast, creating links to other pages does not improve a site's ranking. Otherwise, it would be easy for any site to boost rankings by creating links to highly popular sites like Discovery.com. |
How does page popularity affect relevancy rankings?
Determining ranking and relevancy by page popularity is based on the concept that quality sites with good information draw more visitors. This is a market driven premise that assumes a site is popular because the information provided is of high quality. If a site has a great many 'visitors' and is relevant to your query, it is placed higher on the relevancy list than less popular sites.
What is click-through popularity?
One measure a search engine might include in its ranking algorithm is how often users actually visit or 'click-through' the ranked results of a query. The more often a site is chosen from the query results list, the higher its 'click-through popularity', and the higher it climbs in the rankings. Click-through popularity is a factor in the ranking algorithms of Ask Jeeves, Teoma and others. The time spent at the 'click through' site before returning to the ranked list is also measured. This measure of 'stickiness' can be factored into the ranking algorithm.
Does a site's presence in subject indexes affect its relevancy ranking?
Subject indexes like the Open Directory Project and LookSmart rely on human editors to review websites and categorize worthy sites into subject indexes. Search engine's ranking algorithms use subject index listings as evidence of resource quality. A site that has been reviewed and included in a subject index will be ranked higher than one that has not been listed in a subject index.
Is popularity ranking good for the researcher?
In most cases popularity ranking will improve your search results. Google pioneered this approach and won considerable market share because consumers noticed a significant improvement in the relevancy of returns. Most search engines now use some form of popularity ranking to determine relevancy. When popularity ranking is applied to millions of web pages you get a fairly unbiased measurement of a page's value. Exceptions are when you are researching unpopular opinions or seeking information from newly published resources on the web. A new website might have highly relevant and accurate information, but suffer in the popularity ranking simply because it is new. Of course as the site ages and awareness of its qualities spreads we can assume the popularity of the site will grow.
Authored by Dennis O'Connor 2003-2004