How Do Search Engines Like Google Measure Relevance and Popularity of Content?
The technology that propels Google and other search engines might be ahead of our time but one of the most basic principles, Information Retrieval (IR) was propounded in the middle of 20th century and is still at the core of search engine technology. At that time and for another 40 years information retrieval was used in government labs and research facilities that had retrieval systems. The scientists at that time working on developing the search function realized that the quality of a search result depended on two concepts:
Relevancy (document analysis) – a webpage is considered relevant to the extent which its content matches a query.
Popularity (link analysis) – based on citation (translation: links), the more a particular document is cited, the higher its importance.
No one knows the Google formula for search results but it would be safe to assume that among other things, keyword density (relevance) and the number of incoming links (popularity) go a long way in determining how well you are rated in search engine results.
Relevance depends on Keyword Density: keyword density can make a huge difference in your rankings, but too many keywords can have a negative effect as well. It goes without saying that quality content will not appear to be stuffed with keywords and yet be optimized for search engines. While looking for relevancy a search engine looks for things like where all the search terms appear and how many times is it repeated in a document among other things.
Quick tip: Relevance can be increased by adding keywords to the title, headlines and subheaders or maintaining an appropriate level of keyword density.
Popularity depends on Backlinks: even if you have several incoming links from high PR websites there is no guarantee that Google would rate you higher than peers as it’s not just the number of backlinks that matter but their credibility as well. A link from .gov and .edu would be given more importance than a link from .com or .info and not just that, even the subject matter and quality of content on the linking site makes a difference to those stats.
Quick tip: Popularity can be boosted by increasing the number of incoming links from reputed sites related to your own site/blog.
