The Issues Google Faces When Ranking Links
Not often do people think about how much effort goes into ranking the vast amount of data Google deals with. For example, searching “Barack Obama” on Google leads to 172,000,000 results. After initially considering this, one can conclude that Google must run into several issues when they try to rank links, especially ones that are paid for. This article discusses some of the issues google faces, such as making sure an update to their algorithm doesn’t have catastrophic consequences for certain payers. Certain issues discussed include google needing to be able to detect paid links, and after detecting, being able to categorize the links as either spammy or legitimate. Also included in the article is the fact that Google must deal with harsh PR backlash if an update they make to their ranking algorithm severely harms a company’s reputation.
Google has a few strategies as to how to deal with the issues it faces. Firstly, they do not like to implement large changes to their algorithms very quickly. They prefer slow, small updates, in order to insure everything is working like they planned. Also, Google is moving away from more manual penalties, which take a lot of time and capital to process, and moving towards more of an automatic devaluation of links, which is currently built heavily into their algorithms.
As we have been discussing in class for the past few lectures, Google’s page / link rank is a very complicated process, and to think it is something that doesn’t generate a lot of issues is incorrect. It may seem simple to rank based off the examples we see in class, but in a real life example, much more is at stake. Google works very hard in order to ensure a fair market, and releases updates in order to constantly improve its ranking algorithms.
Give Google a break: Tackling paid links is harder than you may think