Organic/Algorithmic Search Results

Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the system by which websites improve their search engine page ranking based on the use of certain keywords, is dependent on knowledge of the algorithms used by search engines to determine those rankings. These algorithms, which are constantly being refined, apply a large number of criteria in different combinations to create their rankings. These criteria include not only keyword usage and density, but the popularity of a page (measured by inbound links), the relevance to the subject the keyword refers to, and even the personal search history of the user.

What Was

In the early days of search engines, the process by which pages were read and indexed was both cumbersome and inefficient. Webmasters needed to submit their sites to search engines, which would then copy them to their own servers, index them, and then rank them accordingly. Even when spiders and web crawlers were introduced, the system depended more on the information webmasters placed in meta tags than the actual content of the site. This allowed for massive fraud and manipulation of the search engines, often referred to as “black hat” SEO. Because search engines depended on the accuracy of their results to attract customers, black hat SEO tactics not only misled those searching the web, but threatened the survival of the search engines themselves.

What IS

In the years since, numerous methods have been applied to solve this problem, including PageRank, an algorithm that measures inbound links to a page and uses that figure as a guide to the site’s relevance to certain keywords. Though PageRank improved the viability of search engines, it also resulted in the creation of link farms, thousands of sites designed to do nothing more than link to a particular page and increase its PageRank score.

To combat this, newer algorithms were devised, to both identify link farms and disregard their input into the system, and to personalize results. In 2008 Google introduced a system to apply users’ search histories to their results. In 2009 they announced that they would use the complete page-search history of all users as part of their algorithm to further refine search results.

Search engine algorithms are a closely guarded secret and are under constant revision, though it is possible to gain some sense of how they work and what options are being applied by studying patent requests. Several SEO providers publish regular updates based on their own observations and attempts to reverse engineer the algorithms based on current search results.

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