Notes

Reverse Engineering Search Engine Ranking Algorithms
Back inside 1997 I had several research in an attempt to reverse-engineer algorithms utilized by search engines. In of which year, the large ones included AltaVista, Webcralwer, Lycos, Infoseek, and a very few others.

read more had been able to mostly declare my study a success. Within fact, it was consequently accurate that within one case I got able to create a program that will produced the exact same search results as one of the search engines. This article clarifies the way i did that, and how its still beneficial nowadays.

Step 1: Decide Rankable Traits

Typically the first thing to perform is make a checklist of what you want to measure. I came upwards with about 12-15 different possible ways to rank a web page. They included things like:

- keywords in name

- keyword occurrence

- keyword frequency

- keyword in header

- search term in ALT labels

- keyword importance (bold, strong, italics)

- keyword in entire body

- keyword in url

- keyword in site or sub-domain

- criteria by area (density in subject, header, body, or even tail) etc

Action 2: Invent the New Keyword

The other step is to determine which keyword to check with. Typically the key is to choose a word that does not exist in any vocabulary on Earth. Otherwise, you will not be in a position to isolate your current variables for this study.

I used to function at a firm called Interactive Visuallization, and our internet site was Riddler. apresentando as well as the Commonwealth System. At that time, Riddler had been the largest enjoyment web site, in addition to CWN was one of the top trafficked web sites on the internet (in the most notable 3). I considered the co-worker Carol and mentioned Required a fake word. The girl gave me "oofness". I did a new quick search and it was not found on any search motor.

Note that a special word can likewise be used to see who has copied content from your own web sites upon their own. Due to the fact every one of my test out pages are removed (for many years now), a search on the search engines shows some sites that did duplicate my pages.

Step 3: Create Test Pages

The next issue to do was going to create test web pages. I took my personal home page for my now defunct Amiga search motor "Amicrawler. com" in addition to made about seventy five copies of that. Then i numbered each file 1. html code, 2 . not html... seventy-five. html.

For each and every measurement criteria, My partner and i made at least 3 html files. Intended for example, to determine keyword density in title, I modified the html game titles of the first 3 files to look such as this:

one. html:

oofness
second . html code:

oofness
3. html:

oofness
Typically the html files associated with course contained more of my home site. I then logged throughout my notebook that files 1 : 3 were key word density in title files.

I frequent this type regarding html editing with regard to about 75 or even so files, till I had just about every criteria covered. The files w here then uploaded to our web server in addition to placed in the same directoty so that will search engines like google can discover them.

Step four: Hold out for Search Machines to Index Check Pages

Over typically the next few days, some of the webpages started appearing in search engines. On the other hand a site like AltaVista might only show 2 or even 3 pages. Infoseek / Ultraseek at that time was doing real time indexing so I reached test everything immediately. In some instances, I had to await a few several weeks or months with regard to the pages to have indexed.

Simply typing the keyword "oofness" would bring upward all pages found that had of which keyword, in the order ranked by simply the search motor. Since only the pages contained that will word, I might not have competitive pages to befuddle me.

Step 5: Study Results

In order to my surprise, many search engines acquired very poor rank methodology. Webcrawler applied an easy word density scoring system. Within fact, I got able to write a new program that gave the exact same search powerplant results as Webcrawler. That's right, merely give it a new list of twelve urls, and it will rank all of them in the exact same same order like Webcrawler. Employing this program I would create any of my pages rank #1 basically wanted to. Problem is naturally that Webcrawler did not generate any targeted traffic even if I actually was listed number 1, so My partner and i would not bother together with it.

AltaVista replied best most abundant in quantity of keywords in the title of the particular html. It positioned some pages approach in the bottom, but I actually don't recall which in turn criteria performed worst. And the rest associated with the pages ranked somewhere in typically the middle. Overall, AltaVista only cared about keywords inside the subject. Everything else didn't seem to issue.

Some three years later, We repeated this check with AltaVista and found it was providing high preference in order to domain names. So I added a wildcard to my DNS and web storage space, make keywords in the sub-domain. Eureka! All of my personal pages had #1 ranking for any keyword I select. This of course led to one trouble... Competiting web internet sites don't like burning off their top jobs and will perform anything to safeguard their very own rankings because it expenses them traffic.

Additional Methods of Screening Search Engines

I actually is going to quickly list a few other things that could be done to test search engines algorithms. But these are generally lengthy topics to go over.

I tested a few search engines simply by uploading large replicates with the dictionary, and redirecting any visitors to a safe webpage. I also analyzed them by indexing massive quantities regarding documents (in typically the millions) under hundreds of domain names. I found on the whole of which there are extremely few magic keywords found in many documents. The truth still remains that will a few key phrase search times enjoy "sex", "britney spears", etc brought in targeted traffic but most do not. Hence, most web pages never saw virtually any people traffic.

Downsides

Unfortunately there had been some drawbacks to getting listed #1 for a whole lot of keywords. We found that that ticked off the lot of individuals who competing website sites. They will normally start by duplication my winning technique (like placing keywords and phrases in the sub-domain), and after that repeat the process themselves, in addition to flood the search engines with hundred times more webpages than the a single page I acquired made. It produced it worthless to compete for leading keywords.

And second, certain data can not be measured. You should use tools like Alexa to determine targeted traffic or Google's web site: domain. com to find out the amount of listings a domain name has, but until you have got a whole lot of this information to measure, you may not get any useable readings. What great is it regarding you to try and beat a new major web internet site for the major keyword if they already experience millions of guests per day, you don't, plus its part of the research engine ranking?

Band width and resources may become a problem. I have had internet sites where 74% of my targeted traffic was search powerplant spiders. And these people slammed my internet sites every second of every day for years. I would virtually get 30, 000 hits from the Google spider each day, in addition to other lions. And unlike what THEY believe, that they aren't as helpful as they state.

Another drawback is that if you are carrying out this for the corporate web site, it might certainly not look so great.

For example , you may well recall recently whenever Google was caught using shadow pages, and of training course claimed they had been only "test" pages. Right. Does Search engines have no dev servers? No holding servers? Are these people smart enough to be able to make shadow pages hidden from normal users but not wise enough to hide dev or test webpages from normal consumers? Have they not figured out precisely how an URL or perhaps IP filter functions? Those pages need to have served some sort of purpose, and that they didn't want the majority of people to know about it. Maybe these people were just weather balloon web pages?

I recall learning about some pages that were placed by the hot online & print tech journal (that wired people into the electronic world) on research engines. That were there placed numerous blank getting pages using typeface colors matching typically the background, which comprised large quantities of keywords for their biggest competitor. Perhaps they will wanted to pay out digital homage to CNET? Again, it was probably back in 1998. In reality, they were operating articles at the time about how precisely that is wrong in an attempt to trick search motors, yet they had been doing it themselves.

Conclusion

While this particular methodology is good for learning a few things about search engines, generally speaking I would not suggest making this the basis to your web site promotion. The amount of pages to be competitive against, the top quality of these potential customers, the shoot-first mentality regarding search engines, and many other factors will prove that there are far better ways to do internet site promotion.

This particular methodology can be used for reverse engineering additional products. For example , when I worked in Agency. com performing stats, we applied a product made by an important small software company (you actually might be making use of their fine operating system products right now) to analyze word wide web server logs. The problem is that that took more compared with how a day to analyze 1 days worth of logs, and so it was never ever up to particular date. A little little of magic plus a little little of perl seemed to be able to produce a similar reports inside 45 minutes simply by simply feeding exactly the same records into both devices until the results came out the particular same every situation was made up.

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