Search Engine Optimization

Google Hilltop is quite an old algorithm implemented by Google in ~2003.

• Read Google Hilltop Paper

Google Hilltop was released to solve relevancy problem with PageRank, with which any websites could rank on search results as long as they got high PR links, without regard for topical relevancy of those links.

Hilltop partially prevents pagerank flow between websites that have little topical relevance. Pagerank still passes, but the effects are reduces.

…we propose a novel ranking scheme for broad queries that places the most authoritative pages on the query topic at the top of the ranking. Our algorithm operates on a special index of “expert documents.” These are a subset of the pages on the WWW identified as directories of links to non-affiliated sources on specific topics. Results are ranked based on the match between the query and relevant descriptive text for hyperlinks on expert pages pointing to a given result page…

DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, .edu and .gov domains may be considered non affiliated expert documents that Hilltop white paper mentions. It’s far harder to manipulate Hilltop than PR, since it considers topical relevancy between documents.

Paper also mentions that it places emphasis on page Titles and page headings when calculating topical relevancy, which indicates that Hilltop is in active use today, because page title and H tags are 2 of the most important on page SEO elements.

Optimization for Google Hilltop requires you to get links from “expert document” from around the web. Those expert documents are usually .edu and library domains, which are hard to manipulate.

To search for library or expert topical directories you can set up Google alerts. Enter this command:

-yoursite site:.edu

Set one alert for the web and another one for comprehensive.

This way Google will notify you each time it spots an .edu domain that relates to your site and doesn’t have a link to it yet.

Filtering Results:

• Google Hilltop also filters authority values from links that come from affiliated or the same domains.
• It filters links that come from geo-specific domains (sony.com, sony.ca, sony.co.uk, etc)
• Pages that come from the same IP neighborhoods

Hilltop requires at least 2 expert document to consider a page as “voted for”. If there’s only one expert document linking, vote is discounted.

You can learn in-depth about Google hilltop from those document:

• Analysis and Implications of Hilltop Algorithm
• Hilltop white paper