The Negative Influence of Google’s PageRank Feature
PageRank is a concept discussed in class that assesses and assigns the relevance and value of a certain webpage primarily by factoring how many expert websites the webpage links to, and thus draws from, and how many other webpages use this original webpage. In 2000, Google invented PageRank to give users of the internet additional information on the quality of the websites they visited. Some saw a means to exploit this new algorithm. Because the key to increasing PageRank is to have more websites link to the webpage in question, link-selling websites emerged as well as the advent of link-spamming. The goal of these were to paste links to a certain website on numerous other websites so that when Google calculated PageRank there would be more pages referencing the webpage which meant that the website’s PageRank would climb.
Because PageRank was only one factor in Google’s algorithm for ranking which sites would appear first for a given query, Google was eventually able to do away with this component of its algorithm as it ultimately led to spam and attempts by nefarious parties to manipulate search engine results. Since the retirement of PageRank, the use of mass link-dispersion tactics have been rendered obsolete as the only determinant of a webpage’s importance is the word of a third-party source, whose opinion might vary wildly depending on the source, therefore making that measure unreliable.
Link: https://searchengineland.com/rip-google-pagerank-retrospective-244286