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The Authority on Protein Powder Using Linked-Based Ranking

By Jean-Luc LeClair

Walk into any gym nowadays and you’re just as likely to hear the rattling of a shaker bottle as the clanking of weights. Nutritional supplements have become so ingrained in our culture that it’s hard to imagine following up a great workout without a post-workout supplement. With annual sales of over 2.7 billion dollars, Protein powder is in many ways, leading the supplement charge. The online marketplace makes it especially easy to buy protein powders from major retailers. But, how can one know which protein powder to buy when there are thousands to choose from? Simply entering the phrase ‘protein powder’ in a search bar yields a plethora of results. With so many personal blogs and articles endorsing different protein powders, we can think about how these web pages link to each other and create a ‘quality’ measure based on endorsement.

In a search on protein powder, four of the top eight results were sites depicted on the right side of the graph. The abbreviated names represented using two letters indicate ‘BodyBuilding.com,’ ‘Daily Burn,’ ‘Men’s Fitness’ and ‘Muscle and Fitness.’ Using some of my favorite fitness and nutrition sites, I looked for links to the four main sites with regards to ‘protein powder’ and ‘nutritional supplements.’ Sure enough, I was able to find connections in some capacity to several of the main sites. Using these links, I was able to construct a graph and calculate the Authority score of each main website. The Authority score is essentially the level of endorsement a site gets from the web. Shown below is a graph of the websites as Authorities on protein powder.

 

WebBasedLinks

Pages that get more votes, have more links into them and are therefore more highly endorsed. Using a scaled down example, we can show how this phenomena occurs using the total value of everything smaller sites endorsed. We can give each page on the right a score according to the number of votes they got, denoted by links from other websites. We can then calculate the value of a smaller site by summing the total score of all the pages that it points to. We then go back to the right-hand side of our picture and recalculate the values using the new smaller site values. Everyone’s vote is now weighted by their value as a site. This allows the better results to rise to the top; the results that are likely more relevant to someone searching for protein powder on the internet, and in fact, this is what happened.

So, are these sites truly the Authorities on protein powder? Well, not all protein powders are created equal and it’s important to note that not all websites are as knowledgeable as they claim to be. However, based on the endorsement that large sites like Men’s Fitness receive from other websites, there is some truth to its reliability as a source. Although not perfect, this method of quality measure is what google essentially uses to show relevant search results to users. It is still up to the user to determine if the website they’re looking for is the ultimate authority on protein powders.

 

sources:

http://www.bodybuilding.com/store/protein-powder.html

http://dailyburn.com/life/health/how-to-use-protein-powder/

http://www.muscleandfitness.com/supplements/build-muscle/best-and-worst-whey-protein-powders

http://www.mensfitness.com/nutrition/supplements/the-mens-fitness-guide-to-protein

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