Our dynamic ranking algorithm tracks several different inputs. It's constantly undergoing changes as we innovate and learn about how our users interact on our site.
Go Overseas serves as a review resource for users researching opportunities overseas. Our team also uses other review websites daily: Yelp.com, TripAdvisor.com, and especially OnSecondScoop.com. We wish those sites did a better job explaining how they list, rank, and sort the products their users review. We can’t do much to increase their transparency, but we can explain how ours works!
Much like Google’s, we expect our algorithm to evolve and get better over time (and have made several versions of improvements since). We monitor its output (how well listings are ranked on pages) daily. We tweak how different inputs are weighted, and add new inputs, to improve it. It’ll never be perfect, but that won’t stop us from trying.
1. Campaign Spend
Go Overseas is a for-profit social venture. We work with a minority of the 13,000 providers on the site to actively promote their programs to our users. While their listings are promoted, their content (reviews, interviews, rating, etc) is given zero preferential treatment. They don’t get to delete critical reviews. Ever.
2. Review Count and Rating
People come to Go Overseas to learn from program alumni. Nothing is more important to them than having user content to read. It’s just as important to us, which is why it's a big factor in our ranking algorithm.
3. Priority Programs
We encourage all providers on the site to let us know which of their programs are most important. These can be their oldest, their under-enrolled, or pet projects, it doesn’t matter to us. Let our team know where we can make the biggest impact and we’ll over-weight those listings so they appear higher on the pages where they’re listed. Learn more about priority listings here.
4. Review Freshness
Users prefer recent reviews, in particular those left within the last year. Program listings that haven't been reviewed in 1 year will slowly start to be negatively impacted by the algorithm.
5. Updated Content
Go Overseas has been around for almost 12 years and we do our best to keep our content up-to-date, and you should too! Content that hasn't been updated in 1 year will slowly start to be negatively impacted by the algorithm.