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The engines ranked the sites in the beginning by looking almost entirely at those tags and serving results based on whether search words and phrases were contained in the meta tags. That was when everyone publishing web pages was sweet, naive and honest as twelve-year-old boyscouts.
Ranking algorithms began getting immensely more complex as webmasters started manipulating search results either by lying about the content of the site in those meta tags, or by stuffing those tags with keyword phrases. Meanwhile, search engines started looking for formulas that could deliver reliable and relevant results without relying on honesty in meta tags. Google rose to prominence in a very short time by placing far less emphasis on meta tags and far more emphasis on popularity, based on inbound links from other web sites. I recently wrote an article entitled, Reciprocal Linking is Dead! after discovering a dishonest manipulation of that technique to increase affiliate sales through URL cloaking and redirected link schemes. Google's PageRank algorithm, combined with the speed of results pages, made them hugely popular with searchers, who seemed to find those results pages more relevant to their searches. Google continues adjusting algorithms to include site themes, interior linking structure, body text keyword density, frequency of updates, etc.
Search over the past five years had experienced dramatic expansion of players in the late nineties internet boom, followed by implosions of mergers, death & destruction. A brief and humorous article offers a recap of search engine births, marriages and affairs over this period. http://searchengineoptimism.com/Yahoo_acquire_Overture.html Recently, while search providers consolidated to fewer than a dozen major players from the hundreds of search engines of just a few years ago, optimistic new players have emerged seeking a piece of the search pie. Newest on the block is optimistically open source Nutch.com, which promises to openly publish their search algorithms while others continue to hide their proprietary formulae for relevant search results. Meanwhile there are ongoing attempts by some engines to improve algorithms to reduce webmaster manipulation, increase relevancy and produce ever better results. This week, the small, but very aggressive search engine ExactSeek.com announced a partnership with Alexa.com to adjust their ranking relevance using the popularity index of Alexa site rank. This move will, no doubt, anger many smaller webmasters whose Alexa rankings are lower than larger competitors. Smaller localized businesses that compete against national chain retailers will likely slip off the radar under this scheme. Substantial, quality content tips the scales back in favor of smaller content sites here.
But is this different than the popularity index scheme that Google uses determined by inbound links? Will those web sites in the results at ExactSeek with thousands of hard-won links disappear from the results pages when the Alexa factor is applied to ExactSeek algorithm? I did a brief and unscientific test across the biggest search engines by searching for my own site at each one. One search phrase I've targeted is "Small business Internet Tutorial" and the results are enlightening. MSN search returns my site, WebSite101.com as #1 result. Google, I'm proud to say, returns exactly the same #1. AlltheWeb.com gives WebSite101 position #6, still good. Teoma.com returns a results page with WebSite101 at #1. The big boys of search comparing this well established and fairly popular site - all seem to produce similar results, all using differing algorithms to reach that conclusion.
ExactSeek currently ranks WebSite101 at position #2. I had assumed that bigger numbers meant more pageviews. Alexa ranking is based on visits to web sites by surfers using the Alexa toolbar plug-in from Internet Explorer browsers. Their ranking formula is not intuitive and a bit backward to understand. WebSite101 had recently been ranked at about 50,000 in Alexa results and I worried when I discovered that it had changed to 47,000 lately. It turns out that this is actually a better ranking as I discovered after visiting the Alexa site to research this article. The lower the number, the closer you move to #1 in the Alexa rankings. That vaunted #1 position is held by Yahoo!, followed by Microsoft.com and then by Google, not surprisingly. http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500 The controversy that could be generated by incorporating Alexa rankings into ExactSeek results will very likely be that a smaller search engine is basing it's results on popularity among a relatively small group of Alexa toolbar users who visit Microsoft more often than they might visit WebSite101. The Alexa toolbar has been downloaded 10 million times, according to their website and estimates at least 1 million users with the toolbar are surfing at any one time. For a primer on all toolbars, visit Search Engine Watch. I'd like to encourage everyone to visit WebSite101, on my front page, click on "Install Alexa Toolbar" banner at the bottom of the home page and help move WebSite101 up to position 45,000 by visiting me regularly, which will increase my rank to #1 from #2 at ExactSeek. ;-) Webmasters will inevitably work to increase their site rankings by any means they can, but site popularity is less susceptible to those machinations of aggressive webmastering than say, keyword stuffing, reciprocal links farms, etc. Those unethical techniques could lead to being banned by the search engines. While web site popularity is susceptible to traffic exchange schemes, it tends to level off after a period of time as traffic peaks and again declines. Alexa aggregates info across three month periods, which negates brief traffic spikes. Time will tell whether the ExactSeek ranking scheme will be welcomed by searchers, but first impression is that Alexa will favor the popularity of Goliath over David (smaller sites). ExactSeek can incorporate rank from Alexa while filtering out the Goliath factor in their algorithms. Getting the mix right will determine ExactSeek popularity among webmasters. Searchers will ultimately decide if they like ExactSeek results.
Editorial Note:
ExactSeek search result rankings will be fluctuating wildly over the next 1 to 2
weeks as Alexa traffic data is incorporated, the popularity of large community sites like Tripod.com,
GeoCities.com, etc. are offset for subdomains and more than 1 million new sites are added to the
ExactSeek database. Also, the weight assigned to Alexa data in the ExactSeek ranking algorithm has not
yet been finalized and will likely change several times before being fixed.
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