Ranking search results based on anchors
Topics: Backlinks, Ranking, Reranking, User Signals
This Google patent describes a method for improving search result rankings by utilizing user behavior data associated with links between documents. The key idea is to identify relevant anchor links in one document that point to another document, and use the user behavior data (e.g. clicks) from the linking document to compute a quality statistic for the linked document. This allows the ranking system to better assess the relevance of documents that users may browse to after initially clicking a search result, even if those documents don’t appear directly in the results.