Search Engine Ranking Factors

Natural Appearance of Website Structure and Link Growth

For several years, it was quite easy to grab top search engine rankings artificially. For example, the PageRank algorithm in its original form was extremely simple to defeat because it was based mostly on the sheer number of incoming links, any number of which could be artificially created. The same is true for all on page factors and website structure. Larger sites were once at an advantage by default, and spammers took advantage of this too, generating sites with hundreds of thousands of pages each in order to capture the top search engines rankings.

These websites were clearly not natural in any sense of the word, and not meant to be viewed by humans. They were bloated with keyword links and filled in with snippets of random text. Technical tricks were employed to prevent users from seeing the actual spam pages themselves, but the search engines could see them, and eventually they learned to prevent them from achieving top rankings.

Search engines developed countermeasures, spam-filtering algorithms to assess whether or not a page was likely to be spam based on many factors. The effect of these filters was to suppress from the top rankings pages that had an artificial appearance in terms of on page factors, incoming link growth that was too rapid or otherwise suspicious, or numerous other factors. These spam filters became the basis for the current search engine view of the web informed by TrustRank and the Hub/Authority model.

To rank well in the search engines today, a website must have a natural appearance in every possible way. (Unfortunately, if you hire a typical SEO, this might not be what you get. Over-optimization is a commonplace in that industry, and it will harm your website.) A website appears more natural when it grows at a gradual rate, for example, which means you should not allow anyone to link to your website from too many sites too quickly. Websites that link to you must also be relevant to your topic, since links "in nature" tend to be between semantically-related websites. When you release new content, it should be done gradually and in a structured way.

This is not to say that your website's structure is unimportant so long as it's natural. A random, unstructured presentation of content will not help you get top search engine rankings. You should aim for a website with excellent topical organization so that the search engines are able to understand and categorize it according to its semantic theme. Avoiding artificiality, however, is crucial.

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