iEntry 10th Anniversary
RSS
Contact
 |
|
What Makes A Site Relevant? 
By: Chris Richardson 2006-06-02 I've been discussing the topic of search engine spam for a couple of days now and I came upon a WebProWorld post that could be the most important point to consider when discussing this subject: who defines relevancy?
From my perspective, the beholder is the one making this call, much like they do when beauty is involved. For instance, if a fledging web user were directed to a legitimate site by one of these doorway pages, he/she would probably consider the spam site relevant even though it could violate every available search TOS. The post responsible for this discussion brought up some interesting points: Peter (IMC) - What does it mean to have a relevant website? Every webmaster will say that their website is relevant. But they never say to what while that is a very important factor. Relevance is something that doesn't exist by it self. Relevance is a comparison rather than a stand alone factor. When a webmaster complains that his "relevant" website is not ranking high enough, he is simply having a difference of opinion with the search engine in question, a difference of opinion, because relevance can be decided on only through opinions. It is 100% subjective and totally not objective. In other words, what you may view as being relevant may not be so to the search engines. Peter goes on to say: You can come up with 1000 relevance factors but that doesn't take out the fact that out of a couple million results the top 1000 will be almost identical on a relevance scale. Imagine the relevance scores to be between 0% and 100%. The top 1000 will have scores of 100%, 99.99999%, 99.99998%, 99.99997%, etc. There is no significant difference between those scores. If you would be optimizing sites for a search engine like this, just changing 1 word would get you from position 378 to position 1 and visa versa. Some posters are more defiant towards relevance and search engine spam, like longtime poster Andilinks, who says: Spam is spam, though if spam didn't work for its makers it wouldn't exist. "Doorway sites" sometimes add value, sometimes not, when they do not they are spam and not relevant, period. I can speak from direct experience here because my web site treads on that line, being a directory. I'm sure that on occasion it fails and is not useful, but I work hard to see that it does add value. As you can see, defining relevance isn't the easiest thing to do in the world, especially when it comes to search. Unfortunately, discussions like this are circular mainly because it comes down to user preference. If you and I conduct the same search and receive the same results, our opinions will probably still differ because of our individual expectations. However, these differences of opinions do not let the search engines off the hook when it comes to eliminating search engine spam. While they are certainly addressing this issue (see yesterday's article), there is still much work to be done... like responding to webmaster complaints when a spam site is reported and so on. About the Author: Chris is a staff writer for iEntry, focusing on the search industry. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SearchNewz
is an iEntry, Inc. ® publication
©
$line) {
echo $line ;
}
?>
All Rights Reserved. Newsletter Archive - Privacy Policy - Legal - Sitemap - Contact Us - RSS Feeds - Newsletter Signup |
