PageRank: Ranking Out Links
I came across a couple of choice paragraphs last night while reading a book about Google’s PageRank. This book is written by a couple of academics, and not by Internet Marketers looking to spin junk.
These two paragraphs below discuss different methods of ranking outlinks with some sort of priority ranking, such that one link is valued more than another.
This first paragraph, highlighted in yellow, says that a “practical” method of ranking out links is to track what links people are actually clicking on a page to determine the true value of each link on that page. Could this be part of the reason Google supply an Analytics package? After all, a more accurate ranking of out links leads to a more accurate overall PageRank.
If this is true, then for the black hatters:
- Add link on third party page that is using Google Analytics
- Click through link many times to inflate importance of out link on the page.
This next paragraph discusses research ranking out links by the location of the link on the page, the length of the anchor text, and the similarity between the page and the page the link points too. We’ve all read about the importance of spamming linking with anchor text, but it’s nice to see it derive from the world of academia.
The non-highlighted bit goes on to suggest that page similarity could be determined by the angle between two representative vectors of the current page, and the linked page. The interesting point being that the PageRank algorithm would then be inherently bound with the content analysis system which also suggests an importance on linking with thematically related pages.
The book is titled “Google’s PageRank and Beyond: The science of search engine rankings” by Langville and Meyer
A couple of final points worth making:
- What Google choose to implement and what is pure theory will always remain a trade secret and will require real life experimentation.
- If Google are still using the PageRank algorithm as described in this book, then any possible influence of domain age, Class C IPs, domain TLD, etc are quite limited. I’ll save the gory details for another post!
