Local Re-ranking Results Based on Inter-Connectivity
Hilltop
Hilltop was an algorithm that reorganizes search results based on an expert rating system.
In the Hilltop white paper, they talk about how expert documents can be used to help compute relevancy. An expert document is a non-affiliated page that links to many related resources. If page A is related to page B and page B is related to page C, then a connection between A and C is assumed.
Additionally, Hilltop states that it strongly considers page title and page headings in relevancy scores; in fact, these elements can be considered as important as, or more important than, link text. It is likely that Hilltop also considers the links pointing into the page and site that your links come from.
The benefit of Hilltop over raw PageRank (Google) is that it is topic sensitive, and is thus generally harder to manipulate than buying some random high-power off-topic link. The benefits of Hilltop over topic distillation (the algorithm that powers Ask.com, which will be discussed later) are that Hilltop is quicker and cheaper to calculate and that it tends to have more broad coverage.
When Hilltop does not have enough expert sites, the feature can be turned off, and results can be organized using a global popularity score, such as PageRank. Google might be using Hilltop to help sort the relevancy for some of their search results, but I also see some fairly competitive search queries where three of my sites rank in the top eight results. On those three sites, it would be fairly obvious for search engines to know that they were all owned by me.
They may use something like Hilltop to scrub the value of some nepotistic links, but it will not wipe out all related sites just because they are related. When you search for things like Microsoft, it makes sense that many of the most relevant websites are owned by the same company.
Ranking Search Results by Re-ranking the Results Based on Local Inter-Connectivity
That subheading probably sounds like a handful, but it is the name of a patent Google filed. The patent is based on finding a good initial set of results (say the top 1,000 or so most relevant results) then re-ranking those results based on how well sites are linked to from within that community.
If you have many links and have been mixing your anchor text but still can not break into the top results, then you likely need to build links from some of the top ranked results to boost your LocalRank. Just a few in community links can make a big difference to where you rank. A site that has some authority but lacks the in community links may get re-ranked to the bottom of the search results. A site that has abundant authority, like Wikipedia, probably does not need many in community links.
Popularity: 2% [?]
