With a proper search engine like Alta Vista (as opposed to Directories like Yahoo), the results are listed in the order the engine believes, based on the information it has about that page is most relevant cos its there to assist the surfer.
However, sometimes what the engine ‘reads’ and what the surfer gets aren’t the same. This is the cloak and dagger world of search engine promotion. It’s more than bait and switch, could be ‘cloaking’, difficult to say without a lot of analysis.
I didn’t look at the results but either AV was having a funny five minutes itself or someone is being paid to manipulate the pages. If its’ not an Alta Vista brain fart (and AV has been prone to having those this last year) they won’t be the exact same page (look at the full URL, one simple method is to have are one letter or digit somewhere in the directory part of the URL different on each of those pages you saw). Could also be quite a lot more sophisticated.
This is a quick guide to how a search engine orders its results.
First up is relevance, the engine takes a look at all the pages and determines which are 100% relevant to the exact search term used by using the first level of its own uniquely configured algorithm. On a list of results for a phrase that generates 1 million total results, the first few pages are all 100% relevant - perhaps that’s the first 10 pages. After that it doesn’t matter anyway because hardly anyone goes beyond the first three pages anyway.
Big question is: How does the engine determine the order it will list the web pages it has already determined are 100% i.e. those first 10 pages ? There is nothing random in the order and being able to manipulate it so your, or your client’s page, is on page one of the results is very serious business (1999, one guy grossed 4 mill US as an AFFILIATE for Viagra).
The key to ‘manipulating’ the results is really all about understanding the engines algorithm. It’s ‘Algo’ is like a large basket in which the engine weighs different aspects of each and every web page. With some engines, one aspect will weigh a little more than in another, some include aspects that others don’t. Hence, one web page won’t rank highly on every search engine – it’s a tricky little game.
Then the engine will churn it’s algo periodically so its results order changes but those at the top are still 100% relevant- just a different 100%. The real masters of web site promotion are ready for this so that one of their pages at the top is replaced by a similar but, crucially, slightly differently configured page.
What’s typically in an algo ? LOL, was a time when meta tags weighed a little but that’s old, old news. If you think about it, if an engine has to logically sort 1 million results and then sort again (all the 100 percenters) the full algo is going to be very involved. The more factors, the easier to discriminate. I’m not going to give the farm away (if I knew the whole thing, I’d be on a beach somewhere and seriously retired) but if you’re interested you might want to start with looking at keywords ( prominence in the page itself and – importantly - elsewhere, frequency, title, description, URL and still a little in some engines, meta tags – or rather the order of keywords in meta’s and % of keyword vs. total words in the tag).
Engines are increasingly moving away from just page weighing algo’s and now include a lot of factors that are more ‘about’ the page and the whole web site rather than simply how the page itself is configured. Also, for an engine to read any web page it has to be pure HTML, no CSS, etc.
The only analogy that makes sense to me is ‘getting’ the algo is a bit like cracking a safe.