Domain and Page Popularity
There are hundreds of factors that help engines decide how to rank a
page. And in general, those hundreds of factors can be broken into two
categories—relevance and popularity (or “authority”). For the purposes of
this demonstration you will need to completely ignore relevancy for a
second. (Kind of like the search engine Ask.com.) Further, within the
category of popularity, there are two primary types—domain popularity and
page popularity. Modern search engines rank pages by a combination of
these two kinds of popularity metrics. These metrics are measurements of
link profiles. To rank number one for a given query you need to have the
highest amount of total popularity on the Internet. (Again, bear with me as
we ignore relevancy for this section.)
This is very clear if you start looking for patterns in search result pages.
Have you ever noticed that popular domains like Wikipedia.org tend to
rank for everything? This is because they have an enormous amount of
domain popularity. But what about those competitors who outrank me for a
specific term with a practically unknown domain? This happens when they
have an excess of page popularity.
Although en.wikipedia.org has a lot of domain popularity and
get.adobe.com/reader/ has a lot of page popularity, www.awesome.com
ranks higher because it has a higher total amount of popularity. This fact
and relevancy metrics (discussed later in this chapter) are the essence of
Search Engine Optimization. (Shoot! I unveiled it in the first chapter, now
what am I going to write about?)
Popularity Top Ten Lists
The top 10 most linked-to domains on the Internet (at the time of writing) are:
Google.com
Adobe.com
Yahoo.com
Blogspot.com
Wikipedia.org
YouTube.com
W3.org
Myspace.com
WordPress.com
Microsoft.com
The top 10 most linked-to pages on the Internet (at the time of writing) are:
http://wordpress.org/
http://www.google.com/
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
http://www.miibeian.gov.cn/
http://validator.w3.org/check/referer
http://www.statcounter.com/
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer
http://www.phpbb.com/
http://www.yahoo.com/
http://del.icio.us/post
Before I summarize I would like to nip the PageRank discussion in the bud. Google releases its PageRank metric through a browser toolbar. This is not the droid you are looking for. That green bar represents only a very small part of the overall search algorithm.
Just because a page has a PageRank of 5 does not mean it will outrank all pages with a PageRank of 4. Keep in mind that major search engines do not want you to reverse engineer their algorithms. As such, publicly releasing a definitive metric for ranking would be idiotic from a business perspective. If there is one thing that Google is not, it’s idiotic.
In my opinion, hyperlinks are the most important factor when it comes to ranking web pages. This is the result of them being difficult to manipulate.
Modern search engines look at link profiles from many different perspectives and use those relationships to determine rank. The takeaway for you is that time spent earning links is time well spent. In the same way that a rising tide raises all ships, popular domains raise all pages.
Likewise, popular pages raise the given domain metrics. In the next section I want you to take a look into the pesky missing puzzle piece of this chapter: relevancy. I am going to discuss how it interacts with popularity, and I may or may not tell you another fairy tale.
