Many sites are impacted by the Superbowl update. Both Superbowl update and Florida update are major Google updates.
There're many things going on in a major update. iteRank may be one of two major things happened in the Superbowl
update.
There're lot of theories on SEM forums try to explain how search engine ranking algorithms work or the behaviors of a
particular search engine. One theory is better than others if it can explain many things that many other theories try to
explain. I'll use SiteRank idea to explain Sandbox, Google Penalty and Google Ban.
What is SiteRank?
If PageRank measures the importance of an individual page, SiteRank measures the quality of a site. Major factors that can
measure the quality of a site may include:
- strength of content (size of the related content pages),
- quality of links (links from diversified sites with variant anchor text to many different pages),
- freshness of the content (regular update of content),
- uniqueness of content (less percentage of duplicate content),
- age of the site,
- outgoing links (less percentage of deadlinks and more relevant links), and
- Pagerank.
It's not harder to come up with a simple mathematical formula for calculating the SiteRank.
Why SiteRank and How It works?
When Sergy Brin and Larry Page (Google founders) weren't happy about the search results from early search engines (lycos, excite etc.),
they tried Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to improve the quality of search results. SLI didn't work really well. One of things they
noticed that was some one-sentence page ranked #1 for very competitive search terms. So they introduced PageRank from Graphic Theory.
PageRank drastically improved the quality of search results and the performance of search. A search engine can serve majority of
searches using a small amount of documents. It (may) work like this:
- if the search terms aren't specific, look at pages with higher PR pages (PR4 or higher?) only
- if it can't find enough matching pages, search for pages with lower PRs.
- if the search terms are very specific, search for both higher and lower PR pages.
That was when Google had a few million pages in its index database.
Now with billions of pages in the index database, the new heuristic algorithm may work like this:
- if the search terms aren't specific, look at pages from sites with higher SiteRanks (SR4 or higher?) only
- if it can't find enough matching pages, search for pages from sites with lower SiteRanks.
- if the search terms are very specific (more # of search words), search for pages from both higher and lower SiteRanks.
Observation of SiteRank
- If your site get a lot of traffic from keywords that appear only once in a page (not even in title or anchor text), your site has
a very good SiteRank.
- If your site get majority traffic from keywords that appear in title and anchor text, your site has a average or reasonable SiteRank.
- If Pages that link to your pages are ranked higher than your page, your site has a low SiteRank.
- Sandbox or Google Penalty - a very low SiteRank. Why adding many garbage words to your search terms can turn off Sandbox?
Remember: "if the search terms are very specific (more # of search words), search for pages from both higher and lower SiteRanks".
- Google Ban - a zero SiteRank. Google de-indexes a whole domain, not a sub-domain, not or a few directories. The algorithm work at site level.
If you like my ideas, enjoy reading. If you don't like the ideas, think both PageRank and SiteRank are for entertainment only.
The implications of SiteRank on SEO? many.
Related Topics
Google PageRank - Basics, Secrets and Common Misunderstandings
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