Search Engine Optimization

When a search engine collects links pointing to a page, and all of the anchor text in those links, it is possible to make an algorithmic judgment about what the theme and topic of that page is. What if there are not many links pointing to a page? How do search engines decide what the page is about (apart from easy to manipulate on page factors).

Lets take an example: www.site.com/tank-cannons.html. There are several links from www.site.com that point to www.site.com/tank-cannons.html with different anchor text. There are also several links from outside website that point to the page, with different anchor text. When search engines look at the external links, which might be “M1A1 cannon”, “T90 tank”, they may have learned a little about that page. They can also learn more by looking at internal links and the anchor text used there, which may be “tank cannons”, “cannon comparison”, “US vs Russia tanks” and so on. Each anchor text variation tells a little bit about the page, and helps search engines makes a judgment on when to show that page in search results.

Once search engines index a portion of the web, they can analyze relationships of different pages between each other, based on links. Page Rank is an example of this analysis, as PR looks at the links pointing from one page to another, and not the anchor text itself, which gets analyzed at different stages. Based on a graph search engines can get an idea of what the pages are about and use both internal and external anchor text as one more indicator.