All three engines have been using a variation of link analysis to determine what’s relevant and what gets ranked into their databases. But the news of the week has been Microsoft’s research into BrowseRank — analysis that includes time spent at a site or page — added into the source and number of links to the content.

The old way was garnered from the scientific method of giving weight to articles referenced by other academic articles. Given the Internet was initially started as a way for academics to share information, this initial approach made sense. However, with the sheer volume of information, the Web has reached a plateau where such simple methods no longer work well. Add the ability to game the system and you have a methodology that needs an overhaul.

Will Microsoft’s BrowseRank be the answer? That remains to be seen; but it brings its own problems. As Navneet Kaushal of SearchNewz points out, ” As BrowseRank takes into account the time spent by a user on a particular website while compiling its data, it then becomes obvious that it highlights a lot of social networking websites. However, the issues with such websites is that the content of these websites isn’t generally valuable or relevant to audiences at large. This factor makes the BrowseRank ineffective, as it could lead to a lot of results that are irrelevant, spam, or both.”

The Microsoft paper explains their approach where “the user browsing graph can more precisely represent the web surfer’s random walk process, and thus is more useful for calculating page importance. The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important. With this graph, we can leverage hundreds of millions of users’ implicit voting on page importance.”

The biggest question is how they get the time information. Sites would need to have a pixel or some way of passing this information to Microsoft. The push to have sites give this level of access has been around for a while and hasn’t been met with much support.

The conversation I had with Grehan discussed the use of trust — not directly tied to the TrustRank Google has been dropping information about — but the combination of social networks and ranking of Web sites. When a friend tells you about a site, you’re more likely to visit it as you trust his judgment. The building out of communities that have their own ranked access to various places on the Web could well be the way of the future.

Everyone is trying to improve the quality of the information presented by the engines. Microsoft may have some short-term success, but it doesn’t appear to offer the answer needed in our rapidly multiplying information sources. A communal effort using social bookmarking with the ability to search through them may start finding more popularity if the results keep getting less relevant.

Kevin Newcomb Fires Back

It’s good to see Microsoft doing some innovating around search, but I agree with you, Frank. BrowseRank, in its current iteration and used on its own, doesn’t seem to be the answer. But it is a good step in the right direction. I do see a few obvious flaws, including the data-gathering methods you described.

In Microsoft’s paper, the authors say that PageRank, which relies on links, is “not a very reliable data source, because hyperlinks on the Web can be easily added or deleted by Web content creators.” I fail to see how user behavior can be any more reliable, as that can be gamed as well, just in different ways. Instead of buying links, we’ll see spammers employing legions of low-cost Web surfer “farms” to spend time on their sites, for example.

Besides the ability to game BrowseRank, I’d also argue that it’s not an entirely fair way to measure quality in the first place. While a content site may strive to keep readers on the site for as long as possible, a transactional site may focus on getting users to complete a transaction quickly. And a landing page that’s mainly navigational may suffer from its efficiency in directing users to the proper page.

As you mentioned, the experimental results show that social network sites like MySpace and Facebook scored especially high, when scoring sites instead of individual pages. Will they be the new Wikipedia, dominating search results for every search, no matter how irrelevant?

By Frank Watson, Search Engine Watch, Aug 1, 2008

Practical inspirations and ideas for building your website community

Most affiliate programs have several forms of advertisement including banners, text links and free content. There is one in particular that is often overlooked. Many companies pay alot more for a webmaster referal than an actual sale. If not a straight forward sum of money, they usually give you a percentage of the refered webmaster’s sales. These seem to be the greatest payoffs because getting another webmaster to advertise for a company that you yourself are advertising is very rare. This is because the type of traffic you are targeting does not include experienced webmasters. You would have to have a website targeted toward this target category.

So how does one get webmaster traffic to their webmaster ads? Well, why not create them?

Experienced webmasters usually pick a niche and stick with it, basing their sites around certain targets. This makes it even more difficult to refer webmasters to a very specific advertising category. The most ideal traffic would be people who want to make money advertising who haven’t chosen a niche in internet marketing. So how does one attract fresh meat? Easy. Offer something for free. Now what can you offer for free in exchange for deciding to be a webmaster and advertise with your companies? Something that they don’t yet have and will most definitly need: a website.

This sounds like alot of trouble to go through, considering the time you’ve put into developing your own site, and the cost of registering a domain name. But think about it. If you can guarantee a refered webmaster in exchange for registering their domain, you’ll be making a huge profit. I register my domains with a registrar that charges $6.95 a month. If you only register their domain for the first month, thats not alot out of your pocket, considering that some affiliate programs I advertise for pay as much as $100 per webmaster referal! That’s a profit of $93 for a single referal.

Now for the site design. All you would have to do would be to create a one page website centered around the product or service you promote. This way, you can attract the customer by not only a very cheap, completely set up site and domain name, but also making money in the process. Most companies provide lots of free selling tools, content, and information. Your customer would have to sign up for the affiliate programs through your code so you can make your money, and they can make theirs. You would not have to download any materials again after this, because you can use the exact same code for the exact same site over and over again.

So basically, you are offering a complete one page web site which requires that they sign up as a webmaster through your codes, which anyone would be willing to do for cheap webpage and the chance to make money. Therefore, you can charge as little as one cent for copying and pasting html code into the free page of the domain’s registrar, and make all your money from the companies you promote.

You could even give this service away for free and make as much money as you want!

The best part about this system is that anyone can be a potential customer, because everyone wants something free and easy, no matter what it is. Advertising a free website will make almost everyone who visits your page make you a large sum of money. Even though this works with any company, I find it is easier to offer adult websites because the payout is usually higher for a webmaster referal. They also offer alot of free content which can be used as the content of the entire site. Using this method, I am finally making all the revenue that these companies promised me.

About the Author

Jess Marion is an expert webmaster. He specializes in affiliate marketing & looks forward to a long career in advertising.

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