how to get the toppest place in search engines?

En_lizard

i see that pf is the very first results while searching for a physics forum. why?? is it because it has more vistors than other sites? whats google ranking or other search engines base on?

jtbell

Basically, Google ranks pages based on the text that is visible on a page, and on the links that point to a page.

Google doesn't give out further details of its ranking methods because they don't want to give clues to spammers. But they do say that text on different parts of a page can have different weight (plain body text, page titles, section headings, etc.). And they do a lot of analysis of link patterns and other things to try to favor links that people make because they think a site is good, versus links that web site owners exchange or buy outright just to try to increase their ranking.

Many links to PF probably come from .edu sites which are probably considered as generally more "trustworthy" than links from .com sites. Also, it probably helps that the name itself is simply "physics forums".

mgb_phys

Look for "search engine optomisation" there are various ways, some more honest than others, to get high ratings.
Google uses the number of links from other sites (google for PageRank), Physics forums probably comes high because there aren't many other sites called 'physics' which many people link to.