How page is ranked by search engine

Domain and Page Popularity

There are hundreds of factors that help engines decide how to rank a page. And in general, those hundreds of factors can be broken into two categories—relevance and popularity (or “authority”). For the purposes of this demonstration you will need to completely ignore relevancy for a second. 

Further, within the category of popularity, there are two primary types—domain popularity and page popularity. 

Modern search engines rank pages by a combination of these two kinds of popularity metrics. These metrics are measurements of link profiles. 

To rank number one for a given query you need to have the highest amount of total popularity on the Internet. (Again, bear with me as we ignore relevancy for this section.)

This is very clear if you start looking for patterns in search result pages. Have you ever noticed that popular domains like Wikipedia.org tend to rank for everything? This is because they have an enormous amount of domain popularity. 

But what about those competitors who outrank me for a specific term with a practically unknown domain? This happens when they have an excess of page popularity. See Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1: Graph showing different combinations of relevancy and popularity metrics that can be used to achieve high rankings 

Although en.wikipedia.org has a lot of domain popularity and get.adobe.com/reader/ has a lot of page popularity, www.awesome.com ranks higher because it has a higher total amount of popularity.