Bill Slawski (SEO By the Sea) just wrote an excellent post called "20 Ways Search Engines May Rerank Search Results". Now some of this might be speculation, and some might be advanced ranking techniques that search engines just might be using, and few SEO’s know of. I’ve been thinking of doing a post on the topic of "Things Search Engines might be ranking pages on, but few people know of"…..but Bill seems to have covered this pretty well, so I’m out a future post.
Here’s just 2 great ones from Bill’s list of 20:
10. Changing orders based upon commercial intent
Similar to the method described above by virtue of the use of a slider, Yahoo! Mindset lets users determine the reordering of results based upon whether they want to see results that are more commercial in nature or informational.
BTW, if you haven’t used Yahoo! Mindset yet, it’s a great tool to play with.
15. Reordering based upon implicit feedback from user activities and click-throughs
There have been a lot of papers and patent filings that describe reordering of search results by looking at user behavior and query selections. Here’s one that describes looking at different queries over user sessions:
Now the above is a great point that I see few SEO’s talking about!
Bill is an expert at Search Engine Patents, so know that Bill’s speculations come by deep analysis of all the search engine patents and looking at them through the eyes of an SEO.
5 Responses
And how I will know what is speculation and what is real wise idea?
Just because there is a patent on something, doesn’t mean they’re using that…but it could mean that they are….or would like to in the future.
Knowing some of what engines might be looking for is half the battle…the other half is delivering what they want….
…or create a super great resource (that the world will know about), and you don’t need to worry (as much) about all this….(and cross your fingers google will sort it out “right”)….sometimes by knowing some of these ways that engines might rank sites you can help you to help them to sort things “right” 😉
I can bet, if these steps are to include in rankings, then Google will be the first one, and rest will follow 🙂
Yeah… Gogle gone so far away that I can’t find anything great on Google, and if I wish to find your blog, I must go to Yahoo, for example 🙂 Sometimes less ir more, and some advanced Google’s ranking techniques mean just junk on their top search results pages. 🙁
This is a late response but……Bill’s writings on patents are invaluable. I focus on a couple of areas and Bill’s writings were the first I saw that explained changes in G’s rankings and reasons for the algo changes.
The SE’s don’t always implement elements from the patents so you gotta check em closely.
More recently I got off the phone with Bill on a couple of issues. He reiterated that the patents aren’t always applied. On a different issue a recent change in G’s algo’s with regard to G Maps info being inserted into general G serps has created astoundingly powerful opportunities and changes in the short term. One ought to be reading Bill’s comments at SEOBythesea. As to his musings with regard to future changes…..I think his research and follow up are great quality and merit consideration.
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