Search Engine Algorithms

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is a search engine algorithm?

As Google puts it, an algorithm is a computer program that looks for clues to give the searcher back exactly what they want. If we think about really search engines are actually looking at hundreds if not thousands and sometimes millions of results and they need to find out what the most useful results are for the user.

Google’s Hummingbird algorithm

When we think about the search engine algorithm to start with will just think about Google. And Google has a name for its overall algorithm, it’s called Hummingbird.

Sub-algorithms

Within Hummingbird it has sub-algorithms:

• PageRank: One of the first sub-algorithms that Google had was called PageRank. It really is to do with how reputable a page is, so if one page links to another page it will pass some reputation and we call that PageRank.
• Panda: Panda’s job really is to work out what content is good quality and what content is weak or bad quality, we’ll talk a little bit more about Panda as we go through today’s module.
• Penguin: It is kind of the opposite to Panda, but rather than looking for bad content it’s looking for bad backlinks. So when you build links to your website we call that a back link and Penguin’s job is to try and detect which ones are good and which ones are fake and again we’ll talk more about Penguin as we go through this module.
• RankBrain: The most recent out of the sub-algorithms is one called RankBrain and this is Google’s way of really trying to understand what the intent is, behind a keyword or a key phrase and it actually uses artificial intelligence and machine learning.

So we’ve covered some of the sub-algorithms and we know that Hummingbird is the main algorithm.