The influence of search engines and Google in particular on the popularity of web pages is hardly to exaggerate. When a user queries a search engine for a keyword or a key phrase and, having looked through first two or three SERPs, still can’t get desired results, he eventually gives up, and starts looking for something else. When a web page is not in the SERPs - it doesn’t exist.

In the past things were simpler. Few dozens of pages in the search results could be easily sorted according to the keyword density and prominence in the body text and/or meta tags. Now there is a problem of abundance – there are hundreds of thousands, millions of pages to be ranked by relevance and quality. And the notions of relevancy and quality have become very complex.

To measure the relevance and quality of a page search engines employ various algorithms, of which the most widely used are the popularity-based ones. The idea is, the more links point to a page, the more popular this page is, and the higher rank it gets in SERPs. In reality things are not that simple. Ranking algorithms have become quite sophisticated in the evaluation of the page popularity. They are able to detect artificially inflated link popularity, and assign different weight to certain parameters in order to eliminate any possible manipulation of the rankings. Or they can use different ways to determine popularity, like for example Google ranks higher older websites, implying that websites with longer history are well established.

Rich Get Richer

The problem is: can new websites be discriminated in SERPs because of the popularity based ranking systems? If a new website has no incoming links, it can’t be found in search results. If it not in SERPs, no one will find it and link to it. A vicious circle. Conversely – more popular sites become even more popular – ‘rich get richer’.

How do ranking algorithms of search engines impact the website popularity? Is there any pattern of the evolution of popularity? Interested? Read on!