Link-Contexts for Ranking

Abstract. Anchor text has been shown to be effective in ranking[6] and a variety of information retrieval tasks on web pages. Some authors have expanded on anchor text by using the words around the anchor tag, a link-context, but each with a different definition of link-context. This lack of consensus begs the question: What is a good link-context? The two experiments in this paper address the question by comparing the results of using different link-contexts for the problem of ranking. Specifically, we concatenate the link-contexts of links pointing to a web page to create a link-context document used to rank that web page. By comparing the ranking order resulting from using different link-contexts, we found that smaller contexts are effective at ranking relevant urls highly.