Bing and Google’s search engine ranking order
This resource above is talking about the rules for Google and Bing to rank the webpages on their search page respectively. The source lists out the ranking rules, with not only the number of links, which we emphasizes in the lecture, but also other aspects like keywords, etc. In the website, the five key aspects that the webpage include Keywords, Meta Keywords, Backlinks, Social Signals, Multimedia Content. But there are quite some differences between how Google and Bing works.
- For Keywords, Google Creates comprehensive pages backed by keyword research, but focus on topical relevance instead of exact match keywords, while Bing uses straightforward keywords that exactly match the terms you’re targeting in Bing’s search results—just don’t over-optimize or you risk running afoul of Penguin.
- For Backlinks, Google views Authoritative backlinks and high-quality content the most important indicators of a page’s authority when it comes to backlinks, while Bing sees that Link count is weighted more heavily, and factors such as domain age and .gov, .edu, and .org domain extensions are considered trust signals.
- For Social Signals, Google treats Facebook and Twitter pages like any other indexed pages, while Bing sees Social signals are a key ranking factor.
- For Multimedia Content, Google emphasizes text-based content and can’t crawl Flash websites, while Bing puts More emphasis on multimedia content and is able to crawl and understand Flash websites.
This resource provides a perspective about how to rank the webpage on the actual commercial web search engines. In class, we are mostly discussing about the effect of links on the page ranking, where more links coming into the page catches more attention, and the search engine is going to place it higher on the ranking space. However, there are so many more aspects to consider in the real world. This resource online only puts the backlinks as the third most important place when considering the effects on the page ranks, while the keywords and meta keywords play a more important role in this system. Moreover, the backlinks are not treated equally in the system, as Google is also looking into the authoritative backlinks and high-quality content in each page. In the class, we are only considering all the links as equal weights, while in the real world, the links will have different weights based on their property, such as postfix like .gov .edu. Also the weights for each link should change over time in the real world, based on the effectiveness of the links, because the links for each resource would change their usefulness and authority quality over time. For example, paper links with Cornell.edu as the postfix would increase their ranking if Cornell gets increased on its school ranking.
However, there must be more aspects to consider in the real world, which in together constitutes a sophisticated page quality ranking for the use of search ranking.