SEO Landing Pages

The Bow-tie Structure Theory

In the year of 2000, AltaVista, Compaq and IBM created the most accurate website structure and connectivity, not only on-site but as well as the sites that are directly connected to their pages. The picture of the Internet that came out by the research was that of a bow tie. Four defined areas catch up with roughly 90% of the web “the bow tie”, with about 10% of the web totally quarantined from the entire bow tie.

The strongly connected core (the knot of the bow tie) contains almost one-third of all Web sites. Web surfers can easily travel between these sites via hyperlinks, this large connected core is at the heart of the Web.

One side of the bow contains origination pages, constituting almost one-quarter of the Web. Origination pages are pages that allow users to eventually reach the connected core, but cannot be reached from it. The other side of the bow contains termination page, constituting approximately almost one-quarter of the Web. Termination pages can be accessed from connected core, but do not link back to it. The fourth and final region contains disconnected pages, constituting approximately 22% of the Web. Disconnected pages can be connected to origination and/or termination pages but are not accessible to or from the connected core.

Impact of the Study

• Design more effective Web crawling strategies. Crawling then indexing is the fundamental method employed by search engines to organize the Internet. To achieve more complete coverage, AltaVista and other search engines will be able to develop more advanced crawl strategies to capture more of the Web
• Increase the effectiveness of e-commerce. Through the design of more effective browsing, advertising, measuring and modeling, E-commerce sites may decide to use different strategies for attracting surfers from various regions. For example, an origination site will have to increase its efforts to be easily found by Web crawlers. Once the site is linked to the connected core, its strategy may then shift to other traffic-generating measures
• Analyze the behavior of Web algorithms that make use of link information. Because many search engines use link information in ranking algorithms, they become targets for link spamming intended to create an artificial increase in a site´s linkage.
• Predict and capitalize upon the continued evolution of the Web. The researchers believe that the Bow Tie structure will be maintained as the Web grows. While some pages may evolve into the connected core, new pages will continue to be created in all three other regions
• Create mathematical models for the Web. With these findings, researchers can now develop new models to study the growth of the Web and possibly predict the emergence of new, yet unexplored phenomena on the Web.

Bow-tie theory 10 years later

Absolutely, bow-tie still exists and it’s being used. If you are fan of SEOmozBlog like I am, you probably had a chance to watch their Whiteboard Friday – Optimizing Topic Pages video, where Rand Fishkin & guest host Marshall Simmonds talk about the same bow-tie used on today’s websites.

Well this time, I wasn’t writing many of my own words but rather copy + paste what I thought was important about the theory. You can find more information’s on links below.

• SEOmoz Video
• IBM Press Release – from 2000
• The Study

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