Latent Semantic Indexing – An Intriguing Information Retrieval Technique

Recently Google has brought about a new indexing technique called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) for efficient information retrieval. Actually this concept was first used in Google’s Adsense program to find out the most relevant adverts on a particular site. Later a Google owned company named Applied Semantics took shape to help Google employ latent semantic indexing concepts and ideas in its search ranking procedure, and other search engines in the market immediately start using this concept for quality indexing purpose.

In non technical terms LSI is the human-like search ability of the search engines to find out most relevant information using the concept of semantically related words for a particular keyword search. Latent semantic indexing is nothing but the outcome of the search engine efforts in improving its search rankings and result display system further. In view of most of the web users falling prey to irrelevant websites from top search engine rankings, the search engine ranking procedure has lost its due importance. There is a strong urge among search engine makers to modify and update its old ranking system as its ranking algorithm was mainly based on number of links, votes and keywords and suffers from major setbacks resulting in penalization of pretty good sites for no fault of theirs in the mean time. Due to this many sites full of irrelevant keywords, inferior content and linking heavily to other irrelevant sites or even link farms can occupy top positions in search engines and webmasters as well as SEO professionals has started taking undue advantage of it. To stop this discrepancy from occurring further and bring transparency to search engine ranking, search engines revised their major criteria like keywords and links going in and out of the site and considered using synonymous word search facility to add quality and relevance to it. Thus LSI technique has started paying dividends in search engine arena recently.

LSI technique is not that much clumsy, and following it, one can easily build and organize his/her webpage to be found out by search engines successfully for a particular keyword search. Based upon the concept of semantically related words LSI algorithm scans your whole website content for searched keywords, and then establishes relationship between found key phrases and keywords. It even compares them with the already indexed websites for the same keyword and finds synonymous words and phrases. Latent semantic indexing also involves checking grammar, spelling, terminologies and the like on your website and other relevant sites which are already indexed. To be precise, the overall content of your website gets scanned and checked for particular search query text and ranked in the order of its relevancy as compared to already indexed relevant sites in latent semantic indexing mechanism.

A search for keyword “cellphone” on a search engine will bring sites having the highest occurrence of word “cellphone” or links pertaining to it whereas under LSI, a search for the same keyword will display sites that also have the word “mobile phone” or “cellular phone” or any other synonymous terms. Sites with quality and relevant content will always win over sites using illegal practices like keyword stuffing or link spam in higher search engine ranking race. Now, efforts of webmasters and search engine optimizers following ethical SEO practices have started paying results by bringing their site on top positions of major search engines and throwing away irrelevant and rubbish websites from the index list completely. Thus latent semantic indexing decides ranking and performance of a website from its quality and relevancy.

Spamdexing – A Black Hat SEO Technique with Many Side Effects

Search engine optimizers consider adapting both unethical as well as ethical SEO techniques when it comes to increase the search engine visibility of their client’s websites with a higher search engine ranking. Most of the search engines set almost similar set of criteria and use a sophisticated algorithm to determine the search engine ranking of websites on the basis of their relevancy. However most of the site owners try to manipulate the ranking algorithm of search engines in their favor to grab the largest market share of referral traffic from search engines and spread their business further.

What is Spamdexing?

Spamdexing otherwise known as search spam or search engine spam is a black hat SEO technique which follows some unethical web optimization means like content spam, keyword spam, link spam and many more to improve the search engine relevancy or prominence of web resources by manipulating the search engine indexing system. It mainly uses illegal referencing techniques and methods in diverting traffic to a website.

Use of Spamdexing:-

Search engine ranking algorithms give maximum stress on link popularity, authority, relevance and keywords of websites while displaying them in organic search results in the order of relevance. Spamdexing is such a optimization mechanism that its powerful search engine indexing system manipulation features can make web traffic to land on an irrelevant site thereby pushing up its search engine ranking for a particular keyword. As a result the ranking of other spamming sites which keeps the link of this particular site also increase.

Different Forms of Spamdexing: -

There are countless ways of practicing spamdexing. Below is given a list of SEO methods which are found to be widely used but still come under spamdexing.
 Content Spam: - All the content spam techniques are meant for changing the logical view that a search engine has over webpage content. It includes the following techniques:
Keyword Stuffing
Meta Tag Stuffing
Hidden or Invisible Text
Gateway or doorway pages
Scraper sites

 Link Spam: - Link spam is nothing but techniques being followed to get back links for a site from other highly ranked websites only to get a higher ranking thereby influencing search engine’s link based ranking algorithm. It includes the following techniques:
Link Farms
Hidden Links
Sybil Attack
Spam Blogs
Page Hijacking
Cookie stuffing
Buying Expired Domains

 Mirror Websites: - It involves creation of multiple websites all with the same content but using different URLs with an intention to get higher search engine ranking.

 URL Redirection: - It uses META refresh tags, Flash, JavaScript, Java or Server side redirects to take the user to another page automatically.

 Cloaking: - Cloaking is an attempt to mislead search engines by serving them a page which is completely different from that of visitors.


Effect of Spamdexing on Long Run: -

Spamdexing may provide a boost to your site’s ranking on a temporary basis but it carries along with it the risk of your site being banned or penalized by search engines on being detected to use unethical or spammy SEO techniques for manipulating search engine index system. Today search engines are more vigilant to wipe out such web spam stuff in order to increase the quality of indexing system. One has to think many times before choosing the path of spamdexing otherwise search engines may throw away your site from their index list and can go to the extent of banning it.

Link Popularity is the Real Trump Card for Your Site’s Search Engine Ranking

All the major search engines i.e. Google, Yahoo and MSN used to rank a website based on the quantity and the quality of inbound links it has got while showing up in their search result pages. Therefore “search engine ranking” and “link popularity” has become quite complementary these days. One needs to manage his/her site’s incoming links properly and should try to improve their numbers using advance and ethical link building techniques in order to get higher search engine ranking.

What is Link Popularity?

Link popularity is a measure of the number of links pointing to a website from other websites. Strong link popularity positively influences your site’s ranking in organic search results. Links from theme related and quality sites are considered more important by search engines than links from less relevant or unpopular sites.

Importance of Link Popularity:-

Only an increased number of inbound links can’t bring your site higher search engine ranking unless and until they are from quality sites. Quality of links is crucial in assigning websites better link popularity scores and sets apart bad links which are acquired using spammy techniques which some search engine algorithms don’t consider while deciding upon the link popularity for a website.

Role of Link Popularity in Search Engine Ranking: -

Each inbound link is considered a vote for the linked site. Therefore search engines not only consider sites with higher number of inbound links as quality sites but also assign them good link popularity score. Though your link popularity alone can’t make it to high search engine ranking but it will help your site in some form or other to rank high in major search engines.
Major search engine algorithms include link popularity as an important criterion for search engine ranking. Even Google uses link popularity almost exclusively to rank sites. Recently Google has entered into a partnership with Yahoo to provide secondary results for Yahoo's Web directory, so a high ranking for your site in Google may help it indirectly in coming at a higher rank in Yahoo too.
Managing and Improving Link Popularity: -
Link popularity development and management is an ongoing process. Even a quality site with valuable content has to wait for a considerable period of time to have a better link popularity and high search engine ranking.
Fortunately, there are a number of ways to set up your own link campaign and improve link popularity, which will give your site a boost in the search engine rankings. Some of them are as follows:
• Directory Listings: You should make it sure that your site is listed in the Open Directory Project (ODP) and also in Yahoo’s Business Express ($299 yearly) and Look Smart Express Submit or Basic Submit. As directories rely on human editors, they have tremendous potential to boost your link popularity. You may also try searching for other directories on web and try submitting in them too.
• Cross Linking: It is also known as internal linking where you have to cross link all your important web pages properly and tell the search engines that these are the more important pages within your website so that they will rank high in search engines. When you have hundreds of pages and some of them are four or five levels deep, cross linking your pages helps the search engines to find and index your most important pages quicker. Internal linking is a great way to increase the amount of keywords in your visual text links.
• Request Links: When looking for your prospective link partners, start by visiting a search engine and typing in your most relevant keywords. It would be better for you to target non-competing and complimentary sites rather than your competitors. Personally approach the ones that might be receptive to your link request mail. Convince them to link to your site and be sure to suggest where to place your link. A good link request practice is to link to those sites before approaching them with a link request, which might help you get a link back sooner.
• Publish articles: Writing up some informative articles your audience is interested in, and submitting them to online publications may help your site get some quality links over a short period of tome. These articles must be published with your bio which includes your web site URL and a brief description about it.

Link popularity constitutes a major part of your search engine optimization strategies. It can improve your site’s search engine visibility as well as ranking effectively. What is needed is that you should act upon a proper link popularity strategy and get on modifying it further.