Nutshell

Search engines that use information other than the words on the page to rank sites are using "off the page ranking criteria." Surfer behavior or link popularity are used to rank sites instead. Keyword density and placement is still important with these search engines, but it is not critical.

Search engines developed off the page ranking criteria in response to the increasing ability of webmasters to rank a page highly by manipulating the words on the page. Off the page criteria are very difficult to manipulate.

Off the page criteria are not your enemy. Remember, the search engines want to return relevant results to the surfer. If you have a real site with real content, this is your chance to rise above the spammers.

Off the Page Ranking Criteria

Click Popularity

Temporal

Link Popularity

Click Popularity

This is a measure of the appeal of the site title and description to surfers. Search engines know the probability that any given rank will be clicked on. If you are clicked more often than expected, your rank improves. If you are clicked less often than expected your rank drops. This is only used by search engines which pass outgoing referrals through a redirect script. Classic Direct Hit technology.

Temporal

A form of click popularity, this is a measure of the time surfers spend on your site after clicking. Search engines know the probability that a surfer will "back out" of a site and how long that should take. If that percentage is more than expected, or if it happens quicker than expected, that site is reduced in rank. If surfers back out less often, or if they stay longer, that site's rank increases. It also increases rank if surfers never return to the search engine. The assumption is that they found what they wanted. This is used only by search engines which pass outgoing referrals through a redirect script. Classic Direct Hit technology.

Link Popularity

Link Popularity is a method of ranking a website based on sophisticated analysis of the links between sites. Once a simple count of all the links to a website, today link popularity is a sophisticated analysis that weights some links more than others. Link Popularity considers inbound links, outbound links, sites which link to you and the content of linked text. Google has the most sophisticated algorithm but it is also a factor for AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, Webcrawler and HotBot.

More About Link Popularity

Link Popularity considers:

Total number of links

Links to your site and links within your site both matter.

What text links say

Linked keywords are most valuable. Words near the linked text help, but not as much.

Directory Listings

Links from large, human powered directories are weighted very heavily. A link from a directory-listed site has far more weight than a link from an unlisted site. Your Yahoo listing is still the single most important link you can get.

Subject of pages that link to you

A link from a page on the same subject counts much more than a link from an unrelated page. If your site is about race cars, you want lots of links from other sites about race cars.

Cache Data

Cache Data

Used primarily by AOL (Netscape, ODP, AOL Search). Based on the page view data AOL gets by funnelling all their surfers through proxy servers.

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