What’s Next For Webmasters? – How Block Link Analysis Will Affect Your Website

Webmasters have to keep track of the various ways that the search engine companies recommend for optimizing web sites. All of the efforts that the webmaster employs to research and analyze the right key words, use unique page titles, provides keyword rich content that is informational and engaging for visitors are done specifically to give the search engine robots the information they require in the format they prefer.

The data that is collected is used in measurement systems to calculate popularity, page rank and web sites placements in the search engine index. The PageRank system used by Google and the Hyperlinked Induced Topic Search are two of the most popular algorithms that are currently in place which both have shortcomings.

Search technology is under constant development and Microsoft is researching a new way to rank web sites that they call “block-level link analysis”, designed to address the weaknesses in the other systems.

This new measurement system of link analysis could be the next step in improving web search performance. Even though a web page may contain many different elements, most of the existing link analysis algorithms regard a web page as a single unit. In Microsoft’s research a web page is divided into blocks by using a vision-based page segmentation algorithm.

Using this method, relationships of page to block and vice versa from the link structure and page layout analysis enables the construction of a semantic graph of the world wide web to pinpoint each area of concentration for a single semantic topic. As a result two new algorithms have been proposed to be applied to the current measuring systems of page rank and hyperlink induced topic search.

The way the system works is to first accept that all links on a web page are not the same. Therefore it follows that a web page can be divided into different “blocks” that have different topics. The amount of importance given to a specific link is determined by where it is located within the block. This method changes the way the search engine robots look at web pages and in turn will change the way search engines produce results.

The big questions are:

Although this new technology is promising in its potential, it has yet to be proven. One of the first issues to be addressed is how to find common ground between the way the search engine robots view web pages and the way human Internet surfers view them.

Does this mean you have to change all of your web pages now? Not for the time being, this new technology for ranking web pages is still in its beta phase, and it may be quite some time before this technology becomes official. However, for the webmasters who optimize their websites for MSN, this new technology may become more important in the near future to maintain your search engine rankings.

As this is a technology under development by Microsoft it is most likely that it will first be implemented on their venture into search engine technology. However given the scope of Microsoft’s commitment to Internet technology, this is a significant development that webmasters should monitor especially in regard to how it may impact changes in the way the search engine robots of Google and Yahoo analyze your web pages. If this technology proves to enhance pager ranking performance they will have to acknowledge its effect.

As the competition in search technology heats up, webmasters are constantly challenged by a new requirements of the search engine robots. To win the battle for inclusion in the first three pages of search engine results, webmasters can use new technologies such as block link analysis as a boon when they are first implemented by monitoring their development and evaluating how to use them.

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Provided by InfoCreek.com a Website Design Company

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