How do search engines determine the order of items listed when a successful search is completed and is there a way to get a site listed higher?

gtho4

go to this page:- http://groups.google.com/groups?q=google.public.support.general and then click on the topic 'What have you done?' (it's half a dozen down at the moment) .. there's some lively discussion in that thread re search engines and getting to the 'top of the list'. Sep 19 02, 2:27 AM

gtho4

this page is even better, it's google's official policy on ranking webpages:- www.google.com/webmasters/4.html Sep 19 02, 2:36 AM

Gnomon

The traditional method used by AltaVista etc was to list the pages with the most hits first. For pages with the same number of hits, they were listed in any old order. Google came up with a completely different method which made it the number 1 search engine, because it is more likely to return relevant pages. Google does an 'AND' search, so every page returned matches all the words provided by you. It then sorts these in order of how popular the pages are on the WWW. It judges popularity by the number of links to that page on other people's pages. So if you search for London, you will get London, England coming first because pages about that city will have many links to them. Pages about London in the USA will be listed further down, because not as many pages on the web link to them. An obscure personal page belonging to a crackpot which mentions London will come last because there will be no links to it. Sep 19 02, 7:30 AM