Using Google PageRank to Determine A Pages Importance
With the prevalence of the internet throughout the daily lives of people all over the world the importance of what search results a person sees when they use a search engine are extremely important. In 2015 alone Google, the world’s most used search engine received over 1.2 trillion searches which for each one Google had to determine what pages it should show the user and in what order. When Google was first started it used an algorithm known as PageRank which ranks pages based on the number and quality of links to said page. Thus the more links a page has and the more important those links are the more important the website is, thus it is ranked higher. Using this algorithm, Google has been able to deliver accurate results to its users however, Google has recently begun using other metrics to determine the rank of pages.
One example of another metric Google has incorporated is the mobile friendliness of a site. Google has incorporated mobile friendliness after observing that in 2015 more searches were made on smartphones than on computers in the United States. So now instead of just counting the number of links and the importance of those links to determine a page’s importance, Google now determines if the page loads slow, has faulty redirects, or blocks JavaScript. Thus if a website has any of these elements it is deemed non-mobile friendly and even though it may be an important website its rank will fall drastically. Google also uses a version of the hubs and authority method which was discussed in class. In this method, Google determines the importance of an authority, which is a relevant page to the search term, not only by the number of links into a page from so-called hubs but also how many other authorities each of those hubs link to. By implementing this metric, Google ensures that the hubs linking to a certain authority are important in their own right since if an important hub points to an authority than the authority is probably also important. Using these metrics along with several other metrics Google is able to return the most relevant and best pages to a user for any search.
//www.forbes.com/sites/johnrampton/2016/09/30/benchmarking-mobile-page-optimization-with-mobile-search-ranking-findings/#5a14478931e2