Measuring Relevance and Popularity
Here’s a quick history lesson for you: did you know that modern commercial search engines rely on the science of information retrieval (IR)? IR has been a science since around the 1950s, when computer-powered retrieval systems first came into use in libraries, research facilities and government labs. Early in the development of search systems, IR scientists realized that two critical components made up the majority of search functionality:
Relevance - the degree to which the content of a document matched the user’s query intention and terms. The relevance of a document increases if the terms or phrase queried by the user occurs multiple times and shows up in the title of the work or in important headlines or subheads.
Popularity - the relative importance, measured via citation (the act of one work referencing another, as often occurs in academic and business documents) of a given document that matches the user’s query. The popularity of a given document increases every time another document references it.
These two items were translated to Web search 40 years later in what search engine marketers now know as document analysis and link analysis.
In document analysis, search engines look at whether the search terms are found in important areas of the Web page - the title, the meta data, the heading tags and the body copy. They also attempt to automatically measure the quality of the document. A search engine can tell, for example, if a Web page has been keyword-stuffed simply for SEO purposes.
In link analysis, search engines measure not only who is linking to a site or page, but what they are saying about that page/site. They also have a good grasp on who is affiliated with whom (through historical link data, the site’s registration records and other sources), who is worthy of being trusted (links from .edu and .gov pages are generally more valuable for this reason) and contextual data about the site the page is hosted on (who links to that site, what they say about the site, etc.).
Link and document analysis combine and overlap hundreds of factors that can be individually measured and filtered through the search engine algorithms (the set of instructions that tell the engines what importance to assign to each factor). The algorithm then determines scoring for the documents and (ideally) lists results in decreasing order of importance (rankings).
Pleasing the search engines is a pretty complex science. Need help with your website? Call the team at TruePresence at (800) 506-9116. Our search engine scientists are standing by.
Want to learn more about how search engines work. Check out Part One and Part Two of our series now.
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