Google PageRank: A History and How Companies Tried to Cheat It
As we have discussed in class and the problem sets, PageRank is a powerful tool used by companies such as Google to ensure that higher quality pages are ranked earlier in search results (as a result of having more “page rank”.) While Google has achieved great success using the page rank algorithm, it recently decided to remove public accessibility to the PageRank score a website received (a number from 1-10, representing how important Google determined the website to be). Released in 2000 as part of the Google Toolbar, users could view a website’s PageRank meter as a partially filled green bar, in which a longer bar meant a more “important” website. However, PageRank was only one of many ranking algorithms used — the release of PageRank publicly caused many websites to wrongly overstate the importance of their PageRank value, and led to many attempts to manipulate that number through link-buying and link-repeating (for example, linking a page many times in one post to boost the PageRank of that page). As a result, Google removed public access to PageRank scores in March of 2016, but not before several high-profile companies tried to cheat the algorithm.
First, in late 2007, the Washington Post sold links on their blogroll without following Google’s strict quality guidelines (specifically, for not using a no follow tag on their links). As a result, they were demoted from a score of 7 on PageRank to a score of 5, which would have cost them 76.4 million users if it had happened in 2016. Second, in 2005, WordPress hosted 168,000 articles containing “high-cost advertising keywords” that led to an increased PageRank value; this led to them being demoted to a PageRank value of 0 which would have cost them about 10 million users in 2016. Finally, in 2013, BBC was penalized for using “unnatural links to rank for a single page”, which is buying links to change a website’s PageRank value. I found these articles interesting and relevant because they really demonstrate the importance of networks in our society. A site’s PageRank value has a significant impact on the traffic it receives and therefore indirectly the profits it makes, so I thought this was a good example of the relationship between economics and information science (the two subjects I am studying).
RIP Google PageRank score: A retrospective on how it ruined the web
http://www.business2community.com/brandviews/relevance/lessons-learn-companies-tried-cheat-google-lost-infographic-01685251