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How Search Engines Work – 50,000 Foot View

There are many ways to describe this, but at a high level view, all search engines use a scoring system. Each search engine works a little differently, but at the end of the day they all try to accomplish the same thing – deliver relevant, high quality search results.

Search engines make most of their money selling advertising. Because their advertising revenues are directly related to how many searchers use their website, providing good results that satisfy searchers and keep them coming back is where it all starts.

The scoring systems are designed to reward sites for relevance and importance, and penalize them for unethical practices. For a given keyword search, a combination of the following simplified formula shows what is considered by the scoring systems:

+ Relevance

+ Authority

- Spam

Relevance means that the web page is about what the search is about. The search engines worst nightmare is a search for “pope benedict” returning a pornography page. The search engines only want results that match the search query. It is important to use the keywords appropriately within the web page. Relevance can also be established by the type of links that point to the web page.

Authority is a measure of whether the website is “important”. To some degree, all search engines rely on the democratic nature of the internet to determine the relative importance of the pages in its index. Authority score is called PageRank at Google, WebRank at Yahoo and different names by others. All search engines look at links that point to a web page as votes, but not all votes are equal. Votes (links) from important pages are worth many times more than links from unimportant web pages.

Spam, in the search engine world, does not have anything to do with email but instead refers to efforts to manipulate the search engine results. This can include keyword stuffing, link spam, and a host of other practices that are prohibited by the search engines. This is the area where negative scoring can wipe out any positive scoring obtained.

So, the idea for top rankings is pretty simple. Build a highly relevant web page, gain authority by attracting high quality links from other good pages, and do not break the rules. A key point to remember in all of this is to not overdo it, as there are some tipping points. For example if using the keywords on a page are good, then filling a page full of them would be great, right? Wrong! A good way to get penalized is to over-use the keywords on a page. Link exchange networks can get  lots of links, so this must be a good idea, right? Wrong! It is a sure fire way to get your website in trouble.

Search engines want to reward good content  and good links, but efforts to trick the search engines have made them much more careful. They are very quick to penalize things that look like search spam or unethical techniques, so be careful and follow the rules.

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