Calculating Internal PageRank
Google’s well known PageRank algorithm is used to decide what decide which pages should be shown in search results. PageRank heavily weights incoming links as a feature to determine a good result. Thus having many incoming links to a page is critical for that page showing up highly in search results.
This article discusses steps one can take to determine and improve the component of the PageRank score one can control – the rest of the website. By crawling over your own website and doing the PageRank calculations yourself, you can determine the PageRank score of each page in your site in isolation. This allows someone managing the website to make changes to increase the number of links to more important pages, like putting a link to the “Contact Us” page at the bottom of every page.
This relates back to the course content by giving a practical application of PageRank while not directly creating a search engine. Instead, by using this knowledge, one can optimize an entire site to be highly ranked by Google (or DuckDuckGo!). I personally found it extremely interesting the amount of work people (and some entire consulting companies) into increasing PageRank scores. One particularly interesting thing I found was people offering (sometimes large) amount of money to a high traffic site to place a link back to the site being optimized!
Improve internal linking for SEO: Calculate Internal PageRank