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Building Off of PageRank – Google’s Improved Ranking Algorithm

Google holds a grip on internet traffic due to its enormous user base and provided services. Its main source of income is through paid advertisements for websites that wish to receive more views after its ranking algorithm places them on a results page. Result sorting began with the PageRank procedure in class, with pages that have more links to and from itself netting higher scores. This procedure provides a good baseline, but there are many methods to abuse it and achieve higher rankings. Since then, Google has released major overhauls on its algorithm to rank results to weed out manipulative sites that try to artificially increase their scores.

The recent releases of Google’s updated algorithms are a partnering of Panda 4.1 and Penguin 3.0. With the original Penguin appearing in 2012 to locate “webspam,” Google builds off of this ideal. While specifics on how the programs work is not released, general goals and targets suggest that Google is refining its functions to return sources based on organic internet traffic and quality web offerings. The original penguin updates “reward sites that have natural, valuable, authoritative, relevant links, and penalizes sites that have built manipulative links solely for the purpose of increasing rankings, or links that do not appear natural.” The third iteration of Penguin focuses on locating webpages with links that appear artificiality created by software. Since the first iteration of Penguin affected about 3% of sites, some positively and some negatively. The article predicts a similar affection rate for Penguin 3.0, and recommends that if a site users notices a significant decrease in organic traffic they should contact Google to justify their result ranking.

This closely relates to section IV of the textbook, “Information Networks and the World Wide Web” being web trafficking and ranking.  Google’s algorithms build off the fundamentals of PageRank that we discussed in class in order to perform a more accurate ranking.  With the action that Google performs as a worldwide internet hub, the effectiveness of their algorithm determines the fairness of web traffic to their results. With the role that the internet plays in modern society, it is important to fairly and accurately rank the results and provide a natural flow of internet traffic. It is inevitable that Google uses more of the methods discussed in class in order to achieve this goal.

 

The article can be found here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/10/20/penguin-3-0-the-definitive-guide-to-diagnosis-and-recovery/

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