Detailed explanation of the 7 major factors, what influences the ranking of Baidu search results?

User relevance

The search engine first needs to ensure that the presented results are closely related to the user's search needs. The relevance here includes the location and frequency (density) of the keywords on the web page.

For information content that constitutes the vast majority of natural search results, the position and frequency (reasonable) of keywords in the main title , sub-title, first paragraph, and main text will have a direct impact on the search engine's relevance judgment . In the early days of Baidu, the influence of content and user relevance accounted for 70% of search rankings.

Taking this press release from Walmart as an example, the core keywords "Walmart" and "Chen Wenyuan" appear six times and three times in the title and first paragraph respectively. In the search results, web pages with higher relevance will be recommended to users first.

Content timeliness

As a source of timely content that is dynamically updated on the Internet , search engines will give news websites a higher weight. If the content contains relatively clear time point information (such as the specific time when the news occurred), it is more likely to be captured by search engines as fresh and timely content , and then the other indicators (below) will be combined to determine the index and recommendation.

If the content is closely related to hot topics, it has a greater chance of being displayed in Baidu News and web page timeliness cards. When Baidu announced the cancellation of its news source database in March 2017, the core reason emphasized in its announcement was the upgrade of its "timely content identification technology."

Content Quality

The so-called content quality refers to the value that content can generate for users. A very obvious trend in the past year is that Baidu is filtering out content that is not timely or is judged by algorithms to be marketing content in web page and news search results. Even on content publishing portals, they will not be recommended as top search results.

Baidu mentioned in an interview with Interface, "We have a department that has been adjusting the algorithm for the past six months, teaching the machine to judge the timeliness and content quality of all web pages crawled by Baidu. In the front-end display, some soft articles will be filtered out, and others will not change much."

User Engagement

The so-called user engagement refers to the interactive behaviors that constitute user participation, such as reading, clicking, forwarding, commenting, and liking. These indicators are also the basis of Baidu Information Index. The more users engage with the content of a web page, the more important and popular the search engine considers it to be, and the more likely the page will be displayed to users.

Generally speaking, social UGC content such as Zhihu, Douban , etc., recruitment information, classified information, e-commerce information, stock market trends, etc., usually have a high update frequency, a large number of clicks , and the search results will be ranked at the top.

The news value of the information released by news websites determines the user participation. The more people read it, the higher the search result recommendation will be. The higher the recommendation is, the more users will click on it, and it will accumulate in a cycle.

Number of related web pages

In addition to direct access through search, users may access content by clicking on links from other web pages. The more associations generated through other web pages, the more conducive it is to long-term search long tail. For a website, the number of internal and external links, especially the number and quality of anchor texts pointing to pages from external web pages, is still one of the indicators that search engines use to determine the value of a web page.

Page quality

The quality of a web page includes content quality, browsing experience, access speed on PC and mobile devices, friendliness, and whether it can meet users' extended needs. In addition to evaluating sites, Baidu has gradually strengthened the identification and evaluation of content quality, which is integrated into the evaluation of the landing page where the content is located.

Especially after Baidu cancelled its news source database, even for previously authoritative news source sites such as portals, content of different quality on the same channel had significantly different inclusions in Baidu News and web pages. Soft articles (non-timely news) that were comprehensively judged by the algorithm as low-quality marketing purposes would be directly filtered out of the results or reduced in presentation.

Keyword competitiveness is the most easily overlooked and poorly understood factor, but it is precisely the most important hidden aspect that affects the ranking of search results. The so-called keyword competitiveness also refers to the keyword popularity, which refers to the popularity of the keyword in Baidu search and the number of related web pages and news included.

To give a simple example, the more frequently a keyword is searched by users, the more popular it is, the greater the number of related web pages and news included, the greater the competition, which also means that it is more difficult for newly released content to affect the ranking of Baidu search results .

Taking the recently popular "This is Street Dance" program as an example, more than 50,000 people use Baidu to search for "This is Street Dance" every day. There are 4.03 million related web pages and 120,000 Baidu news articles. This means that the newly released content about "This is Street Dance" must compete with the existing 4.03 million web pages or 120,000 news articles. After comprehensive evaluation by the algorithm, only those that have the advantage will have the opportunity to be seen by these 50,000 users when searching.

This is especially true for some industry buzzwords. For example, hundreds of new news articles related to " blockchain " are published every day, totaling 63,000 articles. Search engines must need to calculate at this time, why your content can surpass the other 63,000 news articles related to "blockchain" and 18.2 million related web pages and be displayed in the user's search field of view?

In fact, the so-called algorithm rules and indexes are just for reference. The key is whether the content can truly provide value to users. Just as Baidu officially described in its “How Baidu Search Engine Works”, the factors that affect the ranking of search engine results do not have an exact dimension or answer as algorithms and machine learning technologies continue to develop and update .

Search engine optimization is a long process. Whether it is Baidu advertising or a third-party SEO company, it requires hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in advertising fees or service fees each year. For the public relations department, comprehensive Internet, social multi- channel news releases, and content marketing are the most basic and cost-effective means to influence the long tail of search engines .