Skip to main content



Two New Faces of PageRank

Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/google-algorithms-explained-part-1-dont-be-spam/

Getting on good terms with Google searches involves a lot of playing with SEO and adjusting your website to make sure it is noticed and placed as high up on the page list as possible. The original algorithm developed was called PageRank, and it focused on looking at the amount of references your website has from external links and given a score between 0 and 10 depending on how popular it is. The pretense was that more references meant you were more popular and that was it, but now with anyone being able to make multiple websites, Google had to employ two new algorithms into its arsenal to battle against possible attempts to subversively push up certain websites on PageRank. They are called Penguin and Panda.

Panda had three goals: to weed out thin articles, find duplicate articles, and seek out the websites that purposely try to put in buzz words to push themselves up. Google has found that around 2,000 words on a webpage is good length, has depth and is not too daunting to read, so the algorithm favors pages with around that word count. Sometimes people like to share the same article across multiple pages to get more views, so Panda compares entries and hides duplicates into one link, as can be seen below:

1476770519google-message-at-the-end-of-search-results [picture taken from source link]

Lastly, it looked for a lot of synonymous keywords that were primarily used to try push up the web page in the rankings. This meant that the person was more focused on making the website appear high up on Google so it won’t be very user-friendly or useful. Hence it looks for that and lowers its rank.

Penguin was built in 2012 and left untouched, but recently was put in the main algorithm. It has a goal of searching for unnatural link schemes. As mentioned above, PageRank ranks websites based on the amount of links that are pointing to them so it’s evident that some people would try create websites for the sake of linking their main site. It blacklists websites that host articles for the sake of marketing – where people post article linking to their websites so as to get noticed by PageRank. What I found most fascinating though, is that it also looks for link chains. This usually involves blogs that consists of a main site being linked by blogs which link to each other. Usually though, it is easy to notice this pattern because the blogs themselves do not have much content and only links to the main site.

This concept is interesting because while it creates a fair playing field for all websites to be ranked on content alone, it also stops third party services from undermining Google Ad revenue by offering cheaper ways of getting higher on the page list.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Blogging Calendar

October 2016
M T W T F S S
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31  

Archives