Danger of Manipulating Google’s PageRank
Overstock recently released its earnings report and is blaming the change in Google’s search algorithm on hurting its growth. However, this is not the first time Overstock has had a painful experience with Google’s PageRank algorithm. In 2011, Overstock ran a promotional program that gave discounts to students with .edu email address’s who wrote posts on their university-related webpages that included specific links back to Overstock.com. Google recognized this sudden increase of promotional links stemming from college websites and subsequently dropped Overstock’s ranking for violating Google’s TOS. Overstock is not alone breaking Google’s strict policy against paid links or any attempts to manipulate their algorithm. Forbes was also outed for utilizing its large presence and weight in selling paid links to boost others in PageRank. Conductor, the company that supposedly facilitated this paid link network, has since ceased offering any “link-building services.”
It is clear that Google is looking for only organic and editorial links between webpages; the types of links that actually provide meaningful ranks rather than ranks manipulated by paid networks. Overstock’s strategy was to essentially utilize a myriad of hubs (school websites) that would link to Overstock.com and increase its authority and PageRank. As university websites already have a decent authority score due to the numerous publications and external references, Overstock’s own score would experience a significant increase through the update rules described in class. Meanwhile, Forbes decided to abuse its position as a high-ranking hub and sell essentially “authority points” via links to other business websites. By aggregating these sellers into a paid network through companies like Conductor, paying businesses were able to gain a huge boost in ranking through only a few rounds of the update rules.
Although Link Analysis with Hub and Authorities works theoretically, in practice businesses will utilize whatever means necessary to manipulate the results. It is up to search engines, like Google, to weed out the paid links and establish a hub and authority network that consists purely of natural and sensible links.
http://searchengineland.com/googles-search-algorithmic-overstock-235610