The Advent of the Link-Selling Economy
Google’s PageRank system has been around since the late 1990s. The algorithm, developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, has applied the idea of “link popularity” to the World Wide Web. While this idea makes logical sense, where websites that are more frequently linked to are arguably more popular, Google had not hoped to unleash the beast that they did when implementing the PageRank meter as an add-on in 2000.
The PageRank meter was Google’s way of visually demonstrating their judgement of the importance of a given webpage. If one hovered over the meter, one could see a score from 0 to 10. This simple score was the reason that the link-selling economy was created. Once companies and firms became aware that their status on the web was being dictated by this small bar, they gained an incentive to become the most relevant in order to increase their popularity and in turn increase their revenue. People began to purchase services that provided their websites with more links. This popularity rank became associated with the concept of power, where the most popular websites had the most power in the network of all websites displayed by Google Search. This is because PageRank is not infinite; it is a probability measure that can only add up to one. Increasing the importance of a page will reduce the importance of another. Not only would purchasing more links to your website increase your website’s power, it also decreased the power of all other websites that hadn’t purchased links. This can be visualized on a small scale by the following network.
Suppose the company running website B decides on purchasing more links to increase their power on the network. If A, D, and C do not purchase links to combat the effects that are making their network power decrease, B will gain significant power compared to all the other nodes. If other websites purchase links along with B, then both B and the other websites who purchased links will experience an increase in power, but the increase will be lesser.
The grand issue with Google’s decision to display their PageRank was that it was a huge inconvenience to all those who surfed the web. Links to websites began to be spammed and websites were constantly attempting to one up each other in increasing their supply of links. Fortunately, Google launched its Chrome browser which had the functionality of the Google toolbar built in directly without displaying the PageRank meter. Google also began to discontinue updates to the toolbar’s PageRank. Since nowadays PageRank can no longer be accurately measured, the Link-Selling Economy has fallen from its former glory. Only Google knows the inner workings of its PageRank system and while there can be speculations, no one can be certain. However, the Link-Selling Economy is not deceased. As long as people can guess that PageRank somewhat relies on popularity, they will continue to purchase links.
http://searchengineland.com/rip-google-pagerank-retrospective-244286
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
http://cs423.github.io/images/triangle1.png