Wednesday, January 23, 2013

IM Gurus Hate Me Bonus: Want Some Cool Stuff?

By Aned Moss


PageRank is Google's approach of deciding a website's value based on the number of incoming links it possesses. Quite simply, Google counts the number of links directing to the site and interprets it as confidence votes. In other words, the more votes for a site, the worthier the site is in the eyes of Google.

In the years that the web was rising, several sites that have industry-specific content were constantly being added to the web every day. Web surfers or searchers had very few tools to find these sites which they knew existed but had no idea on how they can be accessed. The start of Yahoo made available some comfort as it structured its directory listing by classifying each site it discovered and in the same way embedded a search engine in its site. This started the use of keywords existing in the database for site searching. Other search engines followed suit with the search trend and relied highly on Meta tags to classify the relevance of a website based on keywords found in the tags.

Everything seemed to work out just fine until site owners and webmasters noticed the possibilities of embedding industry specific keyword phrases in their Meta tags and other site codes to adjust higher rankings in search results. Search engines started getting messy with sites that spammed their content with the misuse of suitable keywords. Most had the keywords but had bad content. The reliability and relevance of search engines were being questioned so they had to think of a method to offer a more polished result to people.

Google spotted the problem which standard search engines had to face in this situation. It acknowledged the fact that as long as the control of meaning stayed with webmasters, the ranking results would continue to be contaminated with the presence of high ranking sites that by artificial means increase their keyword relevance. By the very design of the web, it is agreed on that the web is based mostly on hyperlinks where a site is frequently measured by its linkage to popular sites and the number of links it has. There is the assumption that a site is good and significant if more sites link to it.

The Google creators, Larry Page and Sergey Brin took this logic further when they designed a search engine algorithm that altered the ranking weight to off-page elements. They came up with a formula known as the PageRank where the algorithm would count the number of sites that link to a page and designate it an importance score on a scale of 1-10. The Google scale is not linear but rather exponential in nature.

The PageRank algorithm which was named after its inventor, Larry Page, was implemented with the launch of Google in 1998. The successful consequence enabled Google to pass its competition due to the superior and relevant results it was able to deliver using their formula that was tough to manipulate. The new algorithm helped in offering genuine and good quality information while presenting a challenge to site owners and webmasters who cheat their way to top rank. Google's PageRank is considered one of the principal off-page factors that affect a page's ranking in the search engine result pages. The PageRank value of any page can be checked by downloading the Google Toolbar.

"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its huge link structure as an indicator of an individual page value. Generally, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. But Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important". Essential, top quality sites receive a higher PageRank which Google recalls each time it performs a search. Of course, important pages mean next to nothing to you if they don't match your query. So Google fuses PageRank with complex text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far past the number of times a term shows up on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to figure out if it's a good match for your query."

The exact algorithm of each search engine is a confidential matter. Nonetheless, search engine analysts believe that ranking is a product of a blend of page relevance and PageRank. The search results of Google search are of course high in terms of relevance. This is mostly responsible for the unquestionable success it is experiencing. Other major search engines have adapted this logic in some form with variations on the assigned importance of this value.

The Google Toolbar is downloaded for no cost and can be installed in the user's Internet Explorer within minutes. It helps the display of the PageRank of each web page visited on a scale of 1-10. It doesn't display the PageRank of web pages that it hasn't indexed. The PageRank displayed by the Toolbar relates to individual pages and not to the site as a whole.

Nearly all search engines put significant importance on link popularity in analyzing the importance of web pages ranking and indexing purposes. The system of Link Popularity is dependent on the number and quality of links attached to a website page. This is used in combination with the quality of sites that are linked to the website, the quality of content and the industry relevance to the site.

A webpage that links to one site passes a portion of its own PageRank value in the process. The higher the PageRank of the linking page, the higher the value passed. PageRank is divided over the total outgoing links of the linking page. Therefore, a link from a PR10 webpage with 20 outgoing links means more value than a link with a page of the same PageRank that has 100 outgoing links. Pursuing links from higher PR web pages with lesser number of total outgoing links should be prioritized.




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