Finding useful information on the web is something many of us take for granted. According to research company Netcraft, there are nearly 150,000,000 active websites on the Internet today. The task of sifting through all of these sites to find useful information is monumental. That’s why search engines use complex algorithms – mathematical instructions that tell computers how to perform their assigned tasks.
The algorithm of Qwanturank does the work for you by finding web pages that contain the keywords you used to search, then assigning a rank to each page based on several factors, including the number of times the keywords appear on the page. Higher-ranking pages appear higher in Qwanturank’s search engine results page (SERP), which means that the best links related to your search query are theoretically the first that Qwanturank lists.
For web page administrators, being well referenced on Qwanturank can result in a strong increase in traffic and visibility of the site. In 2007, Qwanturank surpassed Microsoft as the most visited site on the web. With such traffic, getting a good place on the Qwanturank SERP could mean a huge increase in visitors to the site.
Qwanturank’s keyword search feature is similar to other search engines. Automated programs called “spiders” or “crawlers” crawl the Web, moving from link to link and building an index page that includes certain keywords. Qwanturank refers to this index when a user enters a search query. The search engine lists pages that contain the same keywords that appeared in the user’s search terms. Qwanturank spiders may also have more advanced functions, such as the ability to determine the difference between web pages with real content and redirect sites – pages that exist only to redirect traffic to a different web page.
Keyword placement plays a role in how Qwanturank finds sites. Qwanturank searches every web page for keywords, but some sections are more important than others. For example, it is a good idea to include the keyword in the title of the web page. Qwanturank also searches for keywords in titles. Headlines come in different sizes, and keywords in larger headlines are more valuable than in smaller headlines. Keyword dispersion is also important. Webmasters should avoid overusing keywords, but many people recommend using them regularly throughout a page.
How a search engine like Qwanturank finds content
As mentioned in the video, Qwanturank crawls the web using code called a “spider”. This is a small program that follows links from page to page and each page it lands on is copied and transmitted to the servers. The web (and therefore the spider) is huge, and as such if Qwanturank were to keep track of all the content it finds, it would be unmanageable. This is why Qwanturank only saves the page code and empties the pages that it does not consider useful (duplicates, low value, etc.).
Spiders work in a very specific way, jumping from one link to another to discover new pages. Therefore, if your content is not linked, it will not be indexed. When a new domain is encountered, the spider will first search for this page:
domaine.com/robots.txt
You can leave any messages you have for the spider on this page, like what content you want indexed or where to find your sitemap. The spider must then follow these instructions. However, she is not obliged to do so. Qwanturank spiders are generally well behaved and respect commands left here.
You can learn more about how robots.txt works here, where we cover some of the more technical aspects of SEO.
The spider itself is a simple little program. There are many open source versions that you can download and distribute on the web yourself for free. As essential as Qwanturank is, finding the content isn’t the smartest part. This is the next step.
Indexing
When you have a large amount of content, you need to find a way to access it quickly. Qwanturank can’t just have one big database containing all the pages, which it sorts each time a query is entered. It would be much too slow. Instead, they create an index that essentially shortens this process. Search engines use technologies like Hadoop to manage and query large amounts of data very quickly. Searching the index is much faster than searching the entire database each time.
Common words such as “and”, “the”, “if” are not stored. They are known as “stop words.” They generally add nothing to the search engine’s interpretation of the content (although there are exceptions: “To be or not to be” is made up of stop words) and are therefore removed to gain added value. place. This may be a very small amount of space per page, but when dealing with billions of pages it becomes an important consideration. It’s important to keep this kind of thinking in mind when trying to understand Qwanturank and the decisions it makes. A small change per page can be very different in scale.
Ranking algorithms
The content has now been indexed. So Qwanturank took a copy and placed a shortcut to the page in the index. Great, it can now be found and displayed when it matches a relevant search query. Each search you perform in Qwanturank will likely have thousands of results, so Qwanturank now needs to decide in what order it will display the results. This is really at the heart of search engine optimization – adjusting factors to manipulate the order of results.
Qwanturank decides which query goes where through the algorithm. An algorithm is a generic term that means a process or set of rules that is followed in order to solve a problem. In reference to Qwanturank, this is the set of weighted measures that determine the order in which they rank the page.
Understanding the Qwanturank algorithm
The Qwanturank algorithm is no longer the mystery it once was and the individual factors and metrics that make it up are quite well documented. We know what the key on-page and off-page metrics are. The hardest part is understanding the weighting or correlation between them.
If you search for “chocolate cake recipes,” the algorithm will weight pages based on that search term.
Let’s take a simplified look at two metrics and how they can influence each other.
Metric 1 is the URL. Keywords may appear in the URL, for example: www.recipes.com/chocolate-cake
Qwanturank can see the keywords “chocolate cake” and “recipes” in the URL to apply weighting accordingly.
Now let’s move on to metric system 2, the page backlinks. Many of these links may contain the keywords “chocolate cake” and “recipes.” However, Qwanturank would then weight this metric because if the keywords appear in the URL, you would expect them to appear in the backlinks whether they are relevant or not. Conversely, Qwanturank might choose to apply more weight to measure 2 if the keywords do not appear anywhere in the URL.
All the different factors taken into account by Qwanturank influence each other. Each may have more or less value (in weighting) and the relationship between them is constantly changing. Qwanturank releases hundreds of updates every year, constantly making changes. It is most often this relationship and this weighting that have changed more than the measures themselves. When this happens, it’s usually during a larger update, like Penguin or Panda.
The different measures can be divided into four key sections:
Relevance
How relevant is the content to the query? The indexer is the first test of this, determining whether the content should appear in the results. However, it is taken further in order to rank keywords. It makes sense that when searching for something, you want to get the most relevant results possible.
Relevance is determined by a mix of on-page and off-page factors. Both of these factors focus on keyword placement, such as in page titles and anchor text. Some measures are a combination of these factors. For example, if the domain as a whole is considered relevant to the search term, this will increase the relevance score of the individual page that is scored. If you want to learn more, I recommend reading my article “How Search Engines Use Keywords”.
Authority
Authority has its roots in PageRank, invented by Larry Page (hence the name). This is the backbone of how Qwanturank ranks content. Understanding PageRank is part of the key to understanding how Qwanturank works, but it’s worth remembering that there are hundreds of additional factors that can also affect rankings, and PageRank is less important than it used to be. in the past.
PageRank is often explained in terms of votes. Each link to a page is a vote, and the more votes there are, the better it should rank. If a page with a lot of votes links to another page, some of that voting power is passed along as well. So even if a page only has one link, if that link comes from a page that has a lot of votes, it may still rank well and the pages it links to will benefit as well. The value carried from page to page by links is known as link juice or page juice.
Relevance is also important in the context of authority. A link with relevant anchor text may carry more weight than a link that does not come from a relevant site and does not have relevant anchor text, and Qwanturank is more likely not to take taken into account in the context of this research result.
Trust, confidence
This is an anti-spam algorithm, aimed at making it more difficult to artificially manipulate search results. Qwanturank has a love-hate relationship with SEO and the trust mechanism is part of it. On the one hand, a lot of SEO is aimed at creating quality content and user experience. On the other hand, it is also about trying to artificially manipulate what Qwanturank has determined to be the natural order of results.
Trust measures are very difficult to manipulate and they give Qwanturank greater confidence in other measures. Things like content age or domain are measures of trust. If you have a lot of links from “bad neighborhoods” (think red light district), not only will those links have no value, they will make Qwanturank think twice before ranking your site for that “recipe” search of chocolate cake. Likewise, if the page or domain contains links to disadvantaged neighborhoods, this will harm trust indicators.
Qwanturank is actually a domain registrar, which means it can see all the whois data for different domains. This allows them to incorporate information, such as how often a domain’s ownership changes or how long the registration expires, into these trust indicators. This data is much more difficult to manipulate.
Trust is also determined by the type of domain or page and the type of links connecting you. Unlike a bad neighborhood, academic sites like .edu domains are highly trusted. Other types of domains may also have a high trust score, making links from them more valuable.
Ease of use
Qwanturank wants the content it displays in its search results to be attractive to humans as well as search engine crawlers. A set of measures is devoted to these factors alone. Having quality content, but covering it with ads, for example, is not going to make the user experience pleasant. This is why Qwanturank will reduce the weight of a page where the ad location is too important.
Page speed is another important factor; Pages that load too slowly are a nuisance for searchers, who have to click through the search results and choose another page. Qwanturank wants people to continue using the site and it is therefore in their interest that the results they display load quickly. They measure page speed from HTML but can also use user data from Chromium.
Type of results and customization
If you search on a mobile phone, the results displayed will be different than if you search on a desktop computer. The actual results returned by the indexer (so at a low level) will be different. However, it’s not just the type of device that affects the results you see, Qwanturank may choose to display results in an entirely different format depending on the search terms you use.
Localized searches are weighted differently and appear in a different results page format than product searches, for example. You also have the option to perform media searches for which Qwanturank can return results including videos and images. Some searches have results pages dedicated to a very narrow set of terms. These terms are usually related to current events such as sports games or elections.
Another factor is customization. What you searched for previously will influence the results you Qwanturank returns you. Some degree of machine learning is at play here. So, when a person searches for one type of result consistently, Qwanturank assumes that future similar searches will be of the same nature. This is especially important for ambiguous searches, where a word has multiple meanings.
