The term 'rating' originally refers to an evaluation of the percentage of viewers viewing a certain television show and ranking the television shows in a descending order.
Nowadays, in the ago of internet, 'rating' is used to refer to the way in which search engines rate internet pages and websites. The rating results will affect the order in which the websites and pages are displayed in search results.
How is it done (that's actually a good question…)
Every website owner is interested in their site to appear first, second or to at least appear on the first page of a Google search containing a word/subject related to the product/service they offer.
Many consulting companies offer to promote the website's search results potential in order to improve the website's traffic.
Search engines rate the pages they find according to an assessment of their expected relevance to the users' queries by combining query-based questions and independent queries while analyzing and assessing this page's assumed importance.
Hereby are some well-known algorithms that relate to analyzing independent queries:
The HITS (Hyperlink-Induced Top Search) algorithm, Created by John Kleinberg in 1997 to rate internet websites, is an algorithm examines two properties of each page: "authority" which evaluates the links to the page and "hub" which evaluates the links from the page to other pages. Thus, the algorithm attempts to evaluate the page's importance. If the links come from website homepages such as Yahoo!, Google or MSN (which are highly important websites), then the page will be rated highly.
PageRank is an algorithm that serves the Google search to rate websites found in their search engine's results. PageRank, named after Google founder Larry Page, is a method that evaluates the website pages importance. According to Google, " PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the Web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
TrustRank is a technique developed by scientists Zoltan and Gyeonggi, designed to allow search engines to fight spam and pages that manipulated their way to a higher ranking. Human editors scan some of the pages to identify spam websites. Since they no one can scan all internet pages and rely exclusively on this method, TrustRank considers a website credible based on its relation to credible websites.
In conclusion, there are many methods for rating websites for search engines. Methods are developed according to changes in the web itself.
Nowadays, some companies rate internet websites according to various criteria (for example: Alexa, SimilarWeb, etc.) by geographical segments, areas, etc. Below is a list of common websites in Israel (as of 1/17/18) according to SimilarWeb.
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