SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Bill Slawski covers the 20 different ways search engines may rerank search results. It’s certainly worthy of a read.

Here’s a summary of the main points:

1. Filtering of duplicate, or near duplicate, content
2. Removing multiple relevant pages from the same site
3. Based upon personal interests
4. Reranking based upon local inter-connectivity
5. Sorting for country specific results
6. Sorting for language specific results
7. Looking at population or audience segmentation information
8. Reranking based upon historical data
9. Reordering based upon topic familiarity
10. Changing orders based upon commercial intent
11. Reranking and removing results based upon mobile device friendliness
12. Reranking based upon accessibility
13. Reranking based upon editorial content
14. Reranking based upon additional terms (boosting) and comparing text similarity
15. Reordering based upon implicit feedback from user activities and click-throughs
16. Reranking based upon community endorsement
17. Reranking based upon information redundancy
18. Reranking based upon storylines
19. Reranking by looking at blogs, news, and web pages as infectious disease
20. Reranking based upon conceptually related information including time-based and use-based factors

There’s been talk lately in various forums that Google in particular places sites with minor infractions on the 4th search result page. Statistics show that any results on the 4th page onwards get little to no traffic. This phenomenon is also referred to as the -30 penalty. No one knows for sure if this is permanent (if not, penalized for how long) and to what degree the infraction would cause something like this to happen. I personally haven’t seen downward changes in my client’s sites movement. Those who have sites in the top 10 suddenly drop to the fourth page would do well to investigate possible problems like links from bad neighborhoods, appearance of purchased links, lack of unique content, etc.

The word cloaking in SEO for some brings about negative connotations. This technique if used correctly, however, serves its purpose and won’t get you banned.

Here’s the Definitive Guide to Cloaking.

Many times I find clients fixate on optimizing for Google. Sometimes, it seems like people treat it as the holy grail for search engines. Granted, it is difficult to get into top results on Google quickly for reasonably competitive key terms but it is not the only search engine that people use.

Take the British for example. In a study conducted by Harvest Digital, Pandia reports:

…only 24 percent of British searchers use only one search engine.
Surprisingly as many as 20 percent use four or more search engines. Only 22 percent reports that one search engine can supply all the information they need.

There are many searchers who search using AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask as primary search engines as well. Taking into account the overall traffic total from all these people for the key terms in other search engines, in many cases, the number of potential visitors is much greater than simply focusing on G alone. These people my also be more likely to purchase.

So don’t discount traffic just because it comes from another search engine. You’ll find your pockets a little fuller when you rank well across the major search engines…