Search engines are frequently tweaking their ranking algorithms and when that happens some pages lose their top status positions. Many pages were virtually kicked-out of the top 1000 pages for competitive keywords.

With recent updates, webmasters have been thinking that Google does not use Page Rank because low PR pages can obtain very good rankings. Before that everyone was seeing that Page Rank was THE factor for top positions. Now, everyone is saying that keyword rich anchor book links from many different sites is the key for the top ranks.

All these new events seem to indicate that search engine algorithms are totally unpredictable, right? Wrong!

All search engines are going in the very identical direction. The scientific literature related to information retrieval and recent search engine patents reveal the not-so-distant potential of search engine ranking algorithms.

Introducing Topic Specific Link Popularity:

For the last little years search engines relied on General Link Popularity to assess the importance of every page. Relevancy was based on a combination of General Link Popularity (importance) and keyword matches on page and off page.

General Link Popularity is calculated by summing the weight of ALL incoming links to a page. With General Link Popularity ANY link enhanced the importance of a page. Webmasters started to buy high-PR links from totally unconnected sites.

A link from a page will give you significant Topic Specific Link Popularity when:

1) The page itself is optimized for your keywords

2) The page has a tall General Link Popularity (PageRank)

3) The page is from a site owned by someone else. (you can't vote for yourself)