A second off page optimisation factor to consider is the location metric, this considers that URL's which contain the string ".com" are more important than other URL's. The .com term indicates a commercial website, the majority of which originally resided in the USA, as opposed to a university which uses ".ac" or a website originating in the UK which could use the ".co.uk" identifier. This is an indicator of how the web has gradually transferred from the academic domain to the commercial. In 1993 only 1.5% of web sites used the .com domain, by 1997 over 60% of websites use .com domain names.
Any URL containing the string "home" may be of more interest than others.
Another off page metric that can be used is the count of forward slashes any URL contains. Generally the early pages in a website, the root pages, have fewer forward slashes than those further down, search engines assume that URL's with fewer slashes are more important than those containing more, i.e. those that are several folders down the hierarchy.
Other external meta information include things like the reputation of the source, the update frequency, quality, and a web pages popularity or usage. Search engines are well aware that any meta data not displayed on the web page has frequently been abused to manipulate search engine results.
A simple count of any web pages backlinks (any web page that has a hypertext links to it) has been used in the past to rank search engine results, attempting to return users "popular" pages. This system is not ideal because all the links received by a web page are treated equally, so a link, from an unpopular web page is treated as equal to a link from the home page of Yahoo.
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