Page Ranking and the Importance of Links
Ever wonder how to get on top of Google’s search results? Page ranking is the answer. Truth is, almost nobody goes past the first page of Google to see the search results. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, chances are that instead of going to the next page, you are likely to type your search using different wording. This creates a challenge for anybody who owns a webpage and wants it to be seen. What can you do in order to get it to be on the first page of Google so that people actually see it? Well, the key here is to first get an understanding of how page ranking works.
Page ranking is the automated process by which search engines determine the importance of web pages. Links are very important to ranking. For example, let’s say you are looking for “sports” on Google. The top sites that show up are “Yahoo Sports”, “Fox Sports”, and “ESPN”. Since these sites are all popular, it’s not surprising that these are the ones that pop up. We call these sites authorities. One way we can explain how these authorities show up is by “voting by in-links”. This is the process of assigning 1 vote to each authority per every page that links to them. We call the pages that link to these authorities, hubs. The more in-links (links pointing to the authority) a page has, the more popular it gets, and its authority value increases. But this is too simple. Too make it more detailed, there is the concept of “list-finding technique”. This is the idea of also giving values to the hubs in order to list their importance. For example, let say that there are 2 webpages (John’s blog page and a scholarly articles site) that link to 1 or all of the authorities. If John’s blog page links to all the 3 results, while the other one only links to ESPN, then John’s blog page gets more importance. We then apply the “principle of repeated improvement” which gives us an even more detailed description of the popularity of authorities based on how popular or important the hubs are. For example, John’s blog page has a value of 4 and the scholarly articles site has a value of 2. Both of these pages link to the site ESPN. Before, we could say that ESPN had 2 votes because only 2 pages linked to it. But now, given the values of the hubs and the concept of “the principle of repeated improvement” (which adds the values of the hubs that point to the authority), ESPN has a value of 6 (4 + 2).
This process makes the ranking of sites like “Yahoo Sports”, “Fox Sports”, and “ESPN” really high because since these are very well known, they are often linked to the most. This demonstrates the importance of links when trying to get your page to have a high ranking and potentially be on Google’s first page. The CBS New York article that is linked here specifies ways in which you can share your link in order to get it to have a higher ranking. Mainly, these tips are:
- Post constantly so that your page is not static.
- Add social share buttons
- Promote your website on different media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
- Share content by the use of links (like when John’s blog linked to ESPN)
- Get people to link to your page also.
If you follow all of these tips, it will get your page to go through the page ranking process and hopefully get it closer to being on Google’s first page.
Sources:
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/04/07/tips-to-get-your-website-to-the-top-of-a-google-search/
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch14.pdf