SEORank article From Webmaster World

Here is a good article on Google:

“SEORank article From Webmaster World”

I’ll try to break it down into plain English,as best as I understand it.

Remember I am a full time businessman and only a part time geek so I
look to others for confirmation and possible furtther clarification of
my Geek to English translation

In the SEORank article 2 hypothesis are put forward.

The old (pre Florida) G Ranking algo and the new (Post Forida) G ranking
algo.

The new is closely related to the old so I will detail the old first.

Old Google Ranking Formula = {(1-d)+a (RS)} * {(1-e)+b (PR * fb)}

There are damping factors in place but what the size of those factors
are we don’t know so I haven’t included them in my plaimn English
example, just leaving factors we can work with and can deliver and/or
register.

In plain English this means the Old Algo would be:

RS (PR* PRLS)

Where:
RS = Relevance Score which is the relevancy of the page itself.
PR = PageRank which is the Toolbar PageRank (as we can’t measure the
REAL PR)
and PRLS = PR Logarithmic Scale which is mentioned in the article as
probably close to 8. (Though I personally believe that it is slightly
lower.)

In essence this means that making your page more relevant to search
engines had a massive effect on your overall ranking when combined with
PR accumulation.

This was witnessed by many many people and an increase in (Almost all)
inward links would mean that your page would rank well for the relevant
keywords on the page as well as unrelated terms on the page.

Once ineard links had come to a page this would increase PR which could
be passed to other pages on site or run by the company which in turn
meant that all pages SEO’s by the same company had the potential to all
be high ranking.

The upside for SEOers was that by delivering relevant content and
ensuring PR increased they were pretty much guaranteed an increase in
their SERP positions.

The massive downside for Google (and probably searchers in general) was
that onpage content and off page linking was relatively simple to fake
and control and SEOers took advantage of this through linking campaigns
(to increase PR) and tactics such as cloaking to gain high on page
Relevancy scores.

G (and many others) were aware of this and so it has been put forward by
SEORank that the post Florida algo changes have incorporated a new
factor, which is the Local Score

New Google Ranking Formula = {(1-d)+a (RS)} * {(1-e)+b (PR * fb)} *
{(1-f)+c (LS)}

Like the old algo there are damping factors in place and again what we
don’t know what they are so once again I haven’t included them in my
plain English example, just leaving factors we can work with and can
deliver and/or register.

The Hilltop algo adds to the old Algo by giving a further multiplier,
the LocalScore Rank (LS)

LocalScore builds upon PageRank by building a score for a page based
upon the inward links to a page that come from “on topic” “authority
sites”

I won’t go into details about how LS and Hilltop works (as there are far
better resources out there at explaining it than I can muster) but in
essence it means that LS has a massive effect on the previously SEO’d
pages for Searched phrases that have marked as needing to be more
relevant and therefore having the LS score applied.

I say the “searched phrases that have been marked as needing to be more
relevant” as it has been put forward that LocalScore only comes into
play for a subset of searched terms. This is because of the massive
computational overheads of working out a LS for a page and the
impossibility (with G’s current architecture) to compute the LS on the
fly for a search phrase.

This makes sense as post Florida there were many phrases there seemeed
to be heavily effected with little change in other phrases.

Scroogle.org kept a list of the phrases they saw differences in and that
info is still available at
their archived site under hitlist.html

It may or may not still be relevant today.

In plain English the new algo is:

RS(LS (PR* PRLS))

Relevance Score multipled by Local Score multiplied by Real Page Rank.

If this is the case then all onpage SEO factors will have a much smaller
effect on overall SERP positions than prior to Florida.

The way forward for SEOing has now become MUCH harder though there is
still hope for an SEOer (white or black hat) it is just that the game
rules have changed!

I still believe it is good common sense ensure onpage relevancy with
great content.

Further PageRank is still extremely important and all your linking
campaigns should continue, though it should be noted that types of links
should be different from before.

Look at links coming from commercially unrelated sites, (links from
abcd.co.uk to abcd.com will help with PR but not with LS) links coming
from distinctly different IP ranges (Get links from servers in different
data centres) and the most important extra work is…..

… a huge extra element of research time and effort should go in place,
that being to find out who the authority sites are for your widget
subject and get linked to by them.

This can be accomplished by manually undertaking the same process that
Hilltop does but for your specific widget area.

Look at the top results for your widget phrases, your widget sub
phrases, and (lets say..) 2 levels removed in the keyword pyramid and
see who links to these pages.

There will become a natural set of authority sites that are obviously
important for a widget phrase and THIS is where your extra effects
should go in building links and relationships with.

But before you do any of the above I just want to refer to Brett’s
excellent article on building for “15k per day in a year”

If your content isn’t relevant then it isn’t gonna work and IMHO Brett’s
advice is more important today than ever before!

Hopefully I haven’t gotten too geeky and simplified the real world
effects of Hilltop and Local Score, if indeed it is the new algo in
place at G!?

Regards everyone and good luck