Search Engines Rankings Affected by User Behavior

Search Engines Rankings Affected by User Behavior

Some search engines, Such as Google and Yahoo! Have systems like Google Search History and My Yahoo! Which collect information about a user. Search engines can also look at recent searches, or what the search process was for similar users to help determine what concepts a searcher or looking for and what documents are most relevant for your need.

As people use such a system it takes time to build up a search query history and a click through profile. That profile could eventually be used to aid in search personalization or help collect user feedback to determine how well an algorithm is working and what the best result are.

As people give search engines more feedback and it has a larger corpus of data it will become much harder to rank well using only links. The more satisfied users are with your site, the better your site will do as search algorithm continue to advance.

Real-Time vs. Prior-to-Query Calculations

In most major search engines, a portion of the relevancy calculations are stored ahead of time, and some of them are calculated in real time. Some things which are computationally expensive and slow processes, such as calculating overall inter-connectivity (Google calls this Page Rank) are done ahead of time.

Many search engines have different data centers, and when updates occur they roll from one data center to the next. Data centers are placed throughout the world to minimize network lag time. Assuming it is not overloaded or down for maintenances you will usually get search results from the data centers nearest you. If those data centers are down or if they are experiencing heavy load, your search query might be routed to a different data center.

Search Algorithm Shifts

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! Often update their algorithm dozens of times per month. When you see rapid changes in your rankings it is usually due to an algorithmic shift, a search index update, or something else outside of your control. S.E.O. is a marathon, not a sprint, and some of the effects take a while to kick in.

Usually if you change something on a page it is not reflected in the search results that same day. Linkage data also may take a while to have an effect on search relevancy as search engines need to find the new links before they can evaluate them, and some search algorithms may trust links more as the links age.