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It is a mystery to many people as to why search engines operate the way they do. Sometimes the ideal result comes up at the very top of the result list when a person does a search; other times, a person might have to click through a few pages or try entering different search terms in order to come up with a useful result. So, the search engine systems are far from perfect.
But, the methods they use are rather fair-at least for the technology that we have today, anyway. Search engines measure how many links sites have, and that is what they use to rank their results. Sites that have a lot of links are, in the search engines’ eyes, more important-and, therefore, more worthy of being up higher on the results listing. Sites with fewer links will end up lower on the results list because they are not as important, according to the search engine algorithms.
Search engines see links as indicators of importance because that is how they are programmed to work. They have spiders that crawl the web, and the spiders are programmed to count how many links point to any given site. Each link that points to a particular website is counted, kind of as if it were a ‘vote’ for that website. Sites with more links are looked as if they have more ‘votes,’ meaning that the spiders see them as more popular-and, thus, are put at the top of the results list.
Of course, that is oversimplifying things a bit. The computer algorithms that search engines use when determining the ranking of the results of any given search do take other link measures into consideration. Other than the number of links that point to a website, the spiders that crawl the web also measure the quality of the links pointing to a website. Some links are given extra weight, so to speak, because they are known to be trustworthy sites, ones that are well-known as reliable. Other links are given much less weight than normal because the sites from which they come are known to be suspicious.
For example, links from sites ending in .edu and .gov are counted as more dependable and more valuable. If a spider crawls a website and finds links from sites such as nyu.edu and ohio.gov, the spider sees the website as more important. But, if a website is linked to phony websites or link farms, the spider may view the website as less important or suspicious.
Search engines rely on spiders and these algorithms for basically one reason. There are millions (if not more) of searches done on the internet each day. It would simply be impossible-at least with today’s technology-for computers to hunt through each and every website all over the internet each and every time someone did a search. Instead, spiders have indexed a great deal of the web, using these algorithms and link measures, to make web searches quicker for computer users. Unless technology advances greatly, link measuring will be important for quite some time.
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Tags: backlinks, search engines, SEO, Traffic
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Very nice explanation on how search engines use links for site rankings.
It is true that the more links you have, the better the chance that you will get found on search engines. Although this takes quite a lot of time to achieve, link building is very important in SEO optimization.
I really don’t see the value of link building fading in the future. I think it will be a must for a very long time to come.
I’m wondering, with the last few months’ news of Google frowning upon paid links now, if having them will affect a site’s placement in the search engine pages too. We already know it’s hit some webmasters hard with their PR being reduced last go around. I wonder if the same sites they reduced the PR for will also find themselves penalized in that way too and knocked further down the pages? Any thoughts on that?