A big portion of my daily routine involves visiting forums related to all facets of internet. These forums often have some incredible information not readily available anywhere else; best of these (WebMasterWorld, JavaScript City, Spider Foods, WebDev Forums, Lisa Says it all and Web Site Abstraction Forum) are tightly monitored and are heavily trafficked by knowledgeable people.

I find them very useful not just for ideas, but to occasionally post something of interest to others. You know, that's something that I truly enjoy. Stumbling across a post which asks a question, responding and finding out that I really did help someone solve an issue. There are few better feelings than that.

Anyway, today I was looking through some posts on these boards and I noticed a very common concern and theme. Virtually every webmaster on boards is concerned above all else with one thing: getting traffic to their site. And to get traffic virtually all of those same webmasters was convinced they have to get high rankings in search engines.

I'd seen this before, of course, but today I noticed something that actually made me angry. I realized that search engines, especially larger ones, are causing people to self-censor their own sites.

One lady stated she had a painfully built set of links for quilt sites. She believed it was most complete set of quilt links on internet, and seemed quite proud. However, she was disturbed and even was considering removing links because it might hurt her rankings in Google.

I continued looking over posts on that and other forums and found similar posts scattered throughout. One person was afraid because he included pages of content not related to theme of his site. Would Google drop his ranking and thus cut his income? Yet he really wanted to include those pages ... but felt he had to remove them because of this search engine.

You see, what's happening is Google and other search engines have to work very hard to create very intelligent robots to scan web for sites. Until recently, these robots considered each and every page as a separate entity. Now, however, a change is occurring. Google is attempting to group pages together into sites, and then judge all of pages as a group. The implication of this is apparently sites which are "tightly themed" will be positioned higher in results pages than those that are not.

I guess theory is that a tightly themed site is somehow better than a site which has lots of information about many different subject.

Google also ranks pages (and now perhaps entire sites) based upon number and quality of sites that link back. The thought behind this is that if a site is linked to by other quality sites (sites related to theme), then that site is somehow better than other sites and deserves to rank higher.

Let's look at three search engines that factor link popularity into their overall search term rankings.

AskJeeves.com and their new search engine, Teoma, consider what they term general popularity. They consider similar sites and then note whether they have one link coming in or multiple links coming in from other web sites. Higher consideration is given to web sites that have what AskJeeves deems more quality sites linking in rather than lower quality sites. Weight is also put on sites that appear to bear authority within their given content communities. Management of a portal site would be a great way to become a recognized leader in your knowledge content community. Ultimately, for good ranking, you must have recognized authority sites in your outgoing links; sites of quality content among your incoming links; and numerous sites with large amounts of links among them.

FAST, or All The Web, and Lycos which it powers each look at quality of sites you are linking to and that are linked to you. The integrity as well as content of sites within your link community are evaluated in overall value given to your links.