Home > SEO Articles

HillTop Ranking Algorithm
By Syed K. Rizvi

Multiple domain hosting plans emerged as a way for website designers or owners to buy large web space and sub-divide it into a small number of domains. Initially, there were three users of such solution:

1. Owners of mini websites who wanted to lower the cost of running these miniature websites.
   
   
2. Web designers who wanted to resell hosting space on a small scale and tight budget.
   
   
3. Search engine optimizers who intended to build a network of websites and interlink them to boost their link popularity count.

The third group was the one that search engines, in particular Google, started to have problems with. Refinements were needed in the link based ranking algorithm which encouraged the ongoing research on the subject on a faster pace. Of these, Hilltop was a masterpiece that made its name and achieved widespread recognition.

Hilltop, a search engine based on expert documents, was proposed by Krishna Bharat and George A. Mihaila. In summary, it was a novel ranking scheme for broad queries that placed the most authoritative pages on the query topic at the top of the ranking. In its detailed working of the algorithm, HillTop was the first to raise the issue of "detecting affiliated websites". Affiliated websites mean that HillTop suspects them to belong to the same owner or company. To quote from their research paper:

"For further accuracy, we require that at least 2 non-affiliated experts point to the returned page with relevant qualifying text describing their linkage."
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~georgem/hilltop/

How Hilltop identifies affiliated websites is also detailed in the proposal. Same Class "C" IP address is mostly the alarming signal.

Getting back to our discussion on multiple domain hosting plans, almost all of the web hosts offering these packages provide you with a shared ip address for all of your websites. Even if the last digit of the IP address is different, it doesn't help you with escaping the "affiliated websites" check.

Furthermore, the affiliation relation is transitive: if A and B are affiliated and B and C are affiliated then Hilltop takes A and C to be affiliated even if there is no direct evidence of the fact. In practice some non-affiliated hosts may be classified as affiliated, but that is acceptable since this relation is intended to be conservative.

Final Words: Gone are the days of heavy cross linking among your websites. Instead, work hard on building some content that can catch the attention of expert pages, thereby gaining you some high class links.