How Search Engines Rank Your Site
There are many aspects that are taken in to consideration when search engines rank your pages or rank any pages for that matter and one of the most important algorithm behind ranking your site is based up on a metric called DCG (Discounted Cumulative Gain) and I know many of you might have no idea what it really means but don’t worry I will try to explain it more clearly in the best possible way I can so that you come to understand it better.
Search engines like Google use a metric system or was using a metric system called DCG to rank webpages in their search results and I am not yet confirmed with this yet whether Google has dropped using this metric system now to rank webpages but I am sure with the launch of new search engine from Google next year this will go out of their algorithm but still its worth understanding how this works because I am going to explain about the new metric system that new Google search engine that is about to roll out next year might be using (I am not CEO of Google), but I am sure sooner or later the new metric system to rank your webpages will roll out and as a webmaster or SEO professional you must understand the science behind these metrics.
According to DCG search engines weigh a webpage based up on the time spent on that webpage when a person lands on a particular page using his search query and also relevancy of the results and according to this metrics a page or information or document that ranks in position “i” independent of the usefulness or the file or document that ranks in position less than “i”
Let me give you an example so that you understand better for example if I make a query for “optimizing your blog” in Google just look at the top three results I get for this query in Google at the picture below.
So far or even now Google algorithm assumes that information you find the site “searchengineland” and the information you find in the site “quicksprout” or in “problogger” are independent of each other. So how it exactly ranks this websites in these positions is based up on the amount of time spent on these sites by the users who searched for “optimizing your blog”.
So far this is the case and we also tend think its valid assumption but recently Google and yahoo made a detailed study on this subject and found its not true and in fact what they assumed so far with DCG is invalid and they recently landed up on a new metric system that we will discuss in the next article and next article could well unlock you some secret about the algorithm that Google might have implemented in their new search engine so stay tuned and make sure to subscribe.