PageRank: 1996-2014?
The PageRank algorithm has been a standard part of Google since its introduction in 1996. However, in recent years it has lost its effectiveness because of the way people have learned to manipulate their websites to have higher PageRanks than they should. Recently Chuck Price of “Search Engine Watch” wrote an article about the decline and possible phasing out of PageRank in an article entitled “PageRank Dead? – What Will Replace the ‘Green Standard?’” PageRank has been having its problems in recent years, and alternative solutions may be developed.
In this article alternatives to PageRank are brought up that are used by other websites. This is an interesting section of the article because we only learned about PageRank for ranking pages, but there are other ways to do it. Google will most likely come up with its own new metric for ranking pages that will take into account relevance and importance over links. Here are some current possible alternatives to Google’s PageRank algorithm.
Moz is a company that uses an algorithm called Page Authority. Page Authority tries to predict how well a given webpage will rank in a Google search engine result page by using machine learning. It is also a logarithmic scale, which basically means it becomes harder to increase your score the higher it becomes.
Another company, Majestic, uses something they call the Trust Flow metric. This metric basically uses a bunch of websites that the company manually ranked to determine other websites rankings. The rationale is that trustworthy websites will rank to other trustworthy websites and so on and so forth.
Ahrefs uses a URL rank that is a scale “derived from measuring the impact of all backlinks with varying link equity to a given page.” This is done over and over for every page where internal links are included. It says that generally the more backlinks a webpage has the higher its URL rank will be, but links also have values. This means that a higher value link will affect the URL rank more than a low value link will.
Given these three alternatives to PageRank you can see the other possible ways to rank webpages. The question is how will Google rank their pages. The PageRank algorithm has not remained the same over the years, so it is clear the Google is always trying to better it. Will they just alter PageRank or will they create a whole new system to rank pages? Google is an innovator and the leader of search engines so it is clear they won’t just keep with a faulty system. What will they do next? No one but the people at Google will really know. It is interesting to think whether or not in a few years the professors of this class will be teaching about a different algorithm than PageRank, or talking about PageRank as a piece of history.
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2376451/PageRank-Dead-What-Will-Replace-the-Green-Standard