Buying Links to Increase Page Rank Score
RIP Google PageRank score: A retrospective on how it ruined the web
This article describes a feature released on Google’s toolbar back in 2000 called PageRank. When hovered over, PageRank let users see a number from 0-10, indicating the score of the webpage they are viewing. The score is determined by the number of links leading into a webpage. The higher the score of the webpage, the more likely it is that this webpage would bubble up to the surface when the right keywords were searched on Google’s search engine. This development became most interesting for search engine optimization researchers but it also created many problems on the web. As a result of this public knowledge about how Google ranked web pages, people began to sell links to boost PageRank scores. Google’s release of PageRank sparked a internet havoc and how “important” a web page was became influenced by money. A large market for link selling diminished the quality of ranking web pages in this way and since it became such a big problem, in 2005, Google tried to fight it, and many other web services, like Firefox, dropped the PageRank service as well. Now, to prevent this issue, Google keeps its page rankings private.
Chapter 14 in the Networks textbooks focuses specifically on link analysis and web search. The link selling market reminded me of hubs, a key term mentioned in Chapter 14. By buying links, one was increasing the size of the hub and adding to the number of in-links for a website. While Google’s ranking system included many other factors other than just PageRank, the examples in class show exactly how to rank websites based on the number of in and out links and calculate a score for that page. While a higher score or website value means that a particular website will be more highly linked to key search words, it also indicates a power dynamic. The higher up/closer to the top a website appears on a search engine, the more viewers it is likely to have. I found it interesting that even through links and the internet, money equated to power and ultimately created a false impression of which websites were actually important.