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A few folks here think that Hilltop may have something to do with the changes we have seen since November. Others doubt it.
For the sake of discussion lets assume Hilltop is involved. Hilltop requires that a page has links from two "Authority Sites" in order to be ranked.
So how do we identify "Authority sites" to get links from?
What are the features of an "Authority Site"?
Best wishes
Sid
For a specific set of related searches, e.g. "Saharan mountaineering", "mountaineering Sahara", "climbing Sahara", identify all the pertinent sites, and then determine which site is the one most linked to from the others.
Cross-check this with the actual content of the linked-to site, looking for many pages on the subject, or that appear to be on the subject because of title and text kw's.
Check to see if the linked-to site is in DMOZ, Y directory, and any other directories that are regarded as being authoratative.
Look to see if the "authority" site has pertinent, non-spammy out-going links to related sites.
Look to see if it is part of a dodgy linking scheme.
Does anyone have an idea of how Google might do it?
Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying here entirely?
For the sake of discussion lets assume Hilltop is involved. Hilltop requires that a page has links from two "Authority Sites" in order to be ranked.
Just a quick comment - I don't have the time right now to go over the Hilltop paper. However, as I recall, it required two links from an "expert page" as compared to an authority site. These are two very different things. Again, I'm running out the door and if my recollection is wrong, I'm sorry.
My reading of it is that an authority site must firstly have a high PR , and be on topic. I believe it will gain this PR from inbound links from on topic sites. Furthermore , this hub of topic PR must redistribute its PR to on topic sites also.
BTW - in other threads, I have detected quite a bit of confusion re the authority site thing. Some have interpreted it to mean you need to become an authority site to rank well (while that maybe the case, this is not what the Hilltop algo is about). What the hilltop algo/patent is about is that links from an authority site possibly carry more weight in the ranking formula (but not necessarily the PR formula).
I also wonder what the thought is on the on page factors for an auth site? Ie it cant just be links in links out. As I guess the ultimate site in the mix is to have your site as an authority site , id be curious to hear thoughts on the on page factors .
I heard somebody mention the asdsense tool as a means of discovering what google considered your site to be about. I am no where near to be being ready to be accepted for adsense..im in a niche... Is there somewhere i could gain access to this type of analysis?
You are right, I wasn't referring to the paper [cs.toronto.edu ]
This is the original description of expert:
"We define an expert page as a page that is about a certain topic and has links to many non-affiliated pages on that topic. Two pages are non-affiliated conceptually if they are authored by authors from non-affiliated organizations."
They then go on to say:
"For further accuracy, we require that at least 2 non-affiliated experts point to the returned page with relevant qualifying text describing their linkage."
If they have implemented this and thats a big if then they would have to find a way of identifying non-affiliated pages on a subject.
Just anecdotal but In my case I have one site ranking every well and two affiliated sites that have been dropped. The two secondary sites do not have links to them from what I would consider non-affiliated expert pages the one that ranks well does have very good backlinks from ODP, Yahoo and other expert pages with relevant text in anchor and near to it.
Very interesting
Sid
I heard somebody mention the asdsense tool as a means of discovering what google considered your site to be about. I am no where near to be being ready to be accepted for adsense..im in a niche... Is there somewhere i could gain access to this type of analysis?
Just try Googling Adsense tool or something similar. There are loads of free tools around the Web. Also Brett put one on the Adsense forum but I can't seem to find it. If anyone can point to it I'd be grateful.
Sid
Before analyzing such difficult to detect changes in the ranking algorithm as the change to Hilltop, I would start at with obvious changes such as the weight of on-page factors. Although, Google recently made several changes for on-page scoring, I haven't read much about that.
What are the features of an "Authority Site"?
This question could be easily answered if you are assuming that Hilltop is in use:
1.2 Hilltop Algorithm OverviewOur approach is based on the same assumptions as the other connectivity algorithms, namely that the number and quality of the sources referring to a page are a good measure of the page's quality. The key difference consists in the fact that we are only considering "expert" sources - pages that have been created with the specific purpose of directing people towards resources. In response to a query, we first compute a list of the most relevant experts on the query topic. Then, we identify relevant links within the selected set of experts, and follow them to identify target web pages. The targets are then ranked according to the number and relevance of non-affiliated experts that point to them. Thus, the score of a target page reflects the collective opinion of the best independent experts on the query topic. [...]
Our algorithm consists of two broad phases:
(i) Expert Lookup
We define an expert page as a page that is about a certain topic and has links to many non-affiliated pages on that topic. Two pages are non-affiliated conceptually if they are authored by authors from non-affiliated organizations. [...]
Given an input query, a lookup is done on the expert-index to find and rank matching expert pages. This phase computes the best expert pages on the query topic as well as associated match information.(ii) Target Ranking
We believe a page is an authority on the query topic if and only if some of the best experts on the query topic point to it. [...] By combining relevant out-links from many experts on the query topic we can find the pages that are most highly regarded by the community of pages related to the query topic. This is the basis of the high relevance that our algorithm delivers.
Given the top ranked matching expert-pages and associated match information, we select a subset of the hyperlinks within the expert-pages. Specifically, we select links that we know to have all the query terms associated with them. [...] With further connectivity analysis on the selected links we identify a subset of their targets as the top-ranked pages on the query topic. The targets we identify are those that are linked to by at least two non-affiliated expert pages on the topic. The targets are ranked by a ranking score which is computed by combining the scores of the experts pointing to the target.
I still have pages which are ranked very well without any link from what I would see as an expert page.
[webmasterworld.com...]
I have a site full of original content on a particular theme. For two very competitive terms that define the theme I ranked #1 and #8. In mid-January I was booted out of the index (and I mean out of the index) for those terms. For all other (non-competitive) terms I carried on doing fine.
Since then I've tried everything to fix the problem - reducing keyword density (in case of an OOP), increasing incoming links, varying anchor text, adding more content etc. and nothing has changed. When Brandy happened I saw lots of people posting with sighs of relief that they were now back in the index but I was still nowhere to be seen.
Early this morning I started re-reading an analysis of the Hilltop theory. I still couldn't make sense of it because, by any stretch of the imagination and by any technical measure, my site IS an authority. I have some great incoming links and great content. Then I looked again at the criteria for determining an authority site, and noted the point about filtering out duplicate content. I searched Google for a specific phrase from my previously high-ranking page and guess what! Some b*****d has copied the page and hidden it behind his Flash intro!
Once I get this sorted out, I will let you all know if my rankings bounce back. I sent a brief, clear and polite (considering the circumstances) email to the site's registered administrator this morning suggested that he might remove the content in the next 72 hours (was this generous? It is the weekend. And here's a tip for young players - I included his full address at the top of the email just so he know that I know where to send the boys).
After weeks feeling like a complete dunce for not being able sort this out, the pieces are starting to fall into place. For the next couple of weeks I'll be optimising my site for Scroogle placings.
But here is food for thought: if this IS the problem, and I'm reasonably certain it is, Google have just opened a can of worms. With standard PageRank, nobody could damage anyone else's rankings by linking to them. Now I've got a fair idea of what to do if I wanted to bowl someone off the top spot, and that doesn't seem like good thing.
In a pre-processing step, a subset of the pages crawled by a search engine are identified as experts (e.g. by keeping only pages that point to at least 5 non-affiliated hosts we selected 2.5 million pages in AltaVista's index from July 1999).
Who knows how Google might select expert pages!
Who knows how Google might select expert pages!
That's actually what I was trying to ask when I started this thread but my memory failed me and I used the term "Authority" instead of expert.
The Hilltop paper says "identified as experts (e.g. by keeping only pages that point to at least 5 non-affiliated hosts we selected 2.5 million pages" and
"Expert Lookup
Given an input query, a lookup is done on the expert-index to find and rank matching expert pages. This phase computes the best K (eg. K = 200) expert pages on the query topic as well as associated match information (the exact locations in the documents where the query keywords occur, together with the links they qualify)."
This selection based on the term used could explain why some pages rank very well for one term and not at all for another term which they previously did well for.
If DMOZ was not being included prior to Brandy and then became included at Brandy this would explain why my page suddenly went to #1 for a wide range of associated terms.
If Hilltop is part of the new algorithm it is only part of it but its effects have been catastrophic.
What I am really interested in is how do they identify sites by the "same author".
Best wishes
Sid
