who can explain the "Hilltop algo " to me?

[chokan]

I want to know something about the Hilltop Algo,Such as the expert document,and how to get the higher expert scores.

[sunny]

why have you posted this same question twice in google forum and seo descusion?

[laura]

Here's a Document from a Google Employee that I think explains it, though it may be a little old - Just searched Google for HillTop Algo. Experts Correct me if I'm off base here.

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~georgem/hilltop/

[seo guy]

Good post LAura

"We define an expert page as a page that is about a certain topic and has links to many non-affiliated pages on that topic. Two pages are non-affiliated conceptually if they are authored by authors from non-affiliated organizations. In a pre-processing step, a subset of the pages crawled by a search engine are identified as experts. In our experiment we classified 2.5 million of the 140 million or so pages in AltaVista's index to be experts. The pages in this subset are indexed in a special inverted index. "

A great example of an expert site is DMOZ, its a site that is not an authority itself, but links to many unaffiliated sites that are authorities.

[leeds1]

We define an expert page as a page that is about a certain topic and has links to many non-affiliated pages on that topic.

I wonder how many is "many" ?

[seo guy]

5

[leeds1]

Thanks seo-guy

So, for my home page I should add 5 external links to sites that also link out to other sites that they have chosen "just because they like them" and have no affiliation with the site in question ? (and is themed to my topic)

Most of these I suppose would be directories or .govs ?

For my business topic, I have chosen

business.com
dmoz
sbs.gov
businesslink (a uk small business government agency)

Are these good choices ? (oh, and I'm thinking of my 5th)

thanks
Leeds

ps - #1 in my category has 6 links to amazon - would this count ?

[owlcroft]

While the advantages, under a Hilltop system, of being linked to by authority or expert pages is obvious, I am less clear on what the advantages might be to a page of being an authority or expert--save, perhaps, that others might more eagerly seek reciprocals, but that would require pretty definite knowledge of who truly is being accounted an authority or expert.

There were several points in that paper that I found of interest. One is that, even back in 1999, they really did no better than Google was doing even then. Another was that several of their factors seemed rather arbitrary, and there was no discussion of how results might vary as those parameters were "tuned". Do we assume that they did that in the early stages and these are about their best results? Or do we assume that this was just a crude demo, and that fine-tuning the several arbitrary parameters might imrove it significantly?

All for all, it looks like it would be no great paradigm shift for SEO purposes: get good backlinks. The results might shift a little (but might not), but all that webmasters can control stays--so far as I can see--largely the same.