- Keywords in the domain name
- Keywords in the site's directory and file names
- Page titles and tags: for example, a phrase marked up as an H1 (heading)
- element was considered to contain keywords relevant to the page
- Ratio of the keyword(s) to other words on the page, the keyword density
- Content of alternate text provided in the form of Alt tags for images,
- noframes text for browsers not able to display framed pages, etc.
SA new search engine emerged with a new kind of thinking. Google was started by two PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and brought a new concept to ranking web pages. This concept, called PageRank, was, for many years, the mainstay of the Google algorithm.
PageRank relied heavily on incoming links and used the logic that each link to a page is a vote for that page's value. The more incoming links a page had the more "worthy" it was. The value of each incoming link itself varied directly based on the PageRank of the page it was coming from and inversely on the number of outgoing links on that page.
PageRank relied heavily on incoming links and used the logic that each link to a page is a vote for that page's value. The more incoming links a page had the more "worthy" it was. The value of each incoming link itself varied directly based on the PageRank of the page it was coming from and inversely on the number of outgoing links on that page.
PageRank proved to be very good at serving relevant results. Google became the most popular and successful search engine. Because PageRank measured an off-site factor, it was more difficult to manipulate - at first. But manipulated it was. Given time, and the realization that PageRank was the new game in town, webmasters focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links on a massive scale.
PageRank's reliance on the link as a vote of confidence in a page's value was undermined as many webmasters sought to garner links purely to influence Google into sending them more traffic, irrespective of whether the link was useful to human site visitors.
It was time for Google-and other search engines-to look at a wider range of off-site factors. There were other reasons to develop more intelligent algorithms. The Internet was reaching a vast population of non-technical users who were often unable to use advanced querying techniques to reach the information they were seeking and the sheer volume and complexity of
the indexed data was vastly different to the early days. Search engines had to develop predictive, semantic, linguistic and heuristic algorithms.
the indexed data was vastly different to the early days. Search engines had to develop predictive, semantic, linguistic and heuristic algorithms.
The PageRank metric itself is still displayed in the Google Toolbar, but it is only one of several factors that Google considers in ranking pages. You should have the toolbar installed, along with Alexa (from Amazon) - necessary tools to begin.