IS user Feedback important ? How Important Is it?

IS user Feedback important ? How Important Is it?

Although none of the search engines will talk about it much, they all incorporate
some notion of “user experience” in their rankings. This may be as simple as
measuring whether a visitor who clicks a link on search results returns to look at
another result. It may be far more involved than that.


All of the search engines have ways of measuring or estimating the overall user
satisfaction with your web site. How much of a factor this is today, we don’t know,
but you can bet that it will become more important over time.


By designing our sites for human visitors, not spiders, we are protecting ourselves
against any negative impact from user feedback. This is an important part of the
“fast start” system, and always has been.

How Pages Are Ranked - ٍSEO 2012

How Pages Are Ranked - ٍSEO 2012

Every search engine has its own algorithm, or process, for determining where your
pages rank for a particular search term. There are common elements to many of
them, but they all apply their rules a little differently. It’s probably not possible to
create a single web page that satisfies every major search engine completely, but
the system we use in this book has proven to be effective across all of the major
search engines.


There are two types of factors in play with search engine rankings2. What’s on the
page still matters, but “off the page” factors (like the text used in links that point to
the page) are becoming more important.

On page factors vary from engine to engine, so our system tries to position your
pages in the “common ground” between them. The position of keywords (where the
phrase appears) is the most important. If the phrase appears in headings, page
titles, and other key spots on the page, a search engine will see this as more
relevant than a page where the search term appears once in the middle of the page.
In addition to positioning, link popularity and other “off the page” factors contribute
significantly to your page’s ranking. This is because good web sites usually have
other sites linking to them. Since there will usually be a good number of pages that
have just the right mix of keywords and position, link popularity makes a good “tiebreaker”
for search engines to use when ranking pages.

Closely related to link popularity is “link relevance” and weighting. This means that a
link to your "hamster food" page from a page that actually contains those words is
more relevant than a link from an unrelated page. The text used in the link itself is
especially important – this is known as “anchor text” or “link reputation.”
Google’s “PageRank” system is the best documented, and most discussed, of the
search engines’ link analysis methods. I’ll talk about it more in Chapters 4 and 6, but
for now, a simple explanation should suffice.


Essentially, PageRank is a quality of web pages. Every page has some, and it flows
from one page to another through links. The amount of PageRank that flows from a
page is divided between all the links on that page – the more links that point out of a
page, the less PageRank flows through each link.

PageRank comes to a page from incoming links. So the more links you have
pointing into your site, and the more popular (better linked) the sites linking to you
are, the better off you’ll be. The more pages you have in the index, the more
PageRank you have within your site.


As I’ll explain in Chapter 4, you can take some control of how PageRank flows within
your site, which can help you boost the profile of your most important pages.