Understanding
Local Rank

Abstract:

“A search engine for searching a corpus improves
the relevancy of the results by refining a standard relevancy
score based on the interconnectivity of the initially returned
set of documents. The search engine obtains an initial set
of relevant documents by matching a user's search terms to
an index of a corpus. A re-ranking component in the search
engine then refines the initially returned document rankings
so that documents that are frequently cited in the initial
set of relevant documents are preferred over documents that
are less frequently cited within the initial set. “

Detailed Description

As described herein, a search engine modifies the relevance
rankings for a set of documents based on the inter-connectivity
of the documents in the set. A document with a high inter-connectivity
with other documents in the initial set of relevant documents
indicates that the document has "support" in the
set, and the document's new ranking will increase. In this
manner, the search engine re-ranks the initial set of ranked
documents to thereby refine the initial rankings.

1. Query
2. document locator and main ranking component (pagerank)
   generage initial set of relevant documents
     a. This can be
   limited to the top N amount of highly ranked documents
     b. Initial ranking of each doc in this site is called
   OldScore
3. For each doc in the set, the reranking component
   calculates a second value, referred to as LocalScore

    a. LocalScore is based on relative support for that document from other documents in the initial set (number of citations)

   b. Documents linked to by a large number of other documetns in the initial set will have a high LocalScore.

   i. Reranking component will identify all the documents
   that link to document X.
   ii. Documents that share the same 3 octects of the
   IP addrress are identified, and the ones with the lowest
   OldScore are
   removed.

   c. The sensitivity of the localscore changes and is
   controlled by variables in the formula

   d. If there is little interconnectivity between documents,
   the contribution of localrank is diminished

Summary

“In operation, a search engine may receive a search
query from one a user. SE generates an initial list of potentially
relevant documents. These documents are ranked by main ranking
component based on relevance, and then assigned modified
rank values by re-ranking component. The Search engine may
then sort the final list of documents based on the modified
rank values (i.e., on the NewScore values) and return the
sorted list to the user. Ideally, the documents that the
user is most interested in viewing will be the first ones
returned by search engine.”

What this means to SEO’s

• Identify sites that are relevant to yours and would
  appear in the search engines for your target keywords
• Important to get links from those sites
• The more links you have from sites that rank
  well for your keywords, the higher your LocalScore will
  be
• If you have a high LocalScore, the originial
  score will be modified and you will rank higher due to
  a high NewScore
• You can rank higher than sites that are more
  relevant if many relevant sites link to yours.
• If your site is already very relevant (onpage
  criteria and inbound links), and you get a lot of relevant
  sites to link to you, your score will be modified and you
  can rank higher