Google PageRank Ruins the Web
In the year 2000 Google released a PageRank meter that enabled the users to see a PageRank score of any page that they were viewing. Google released the PageRank meter with the intent of allowing the users to see the quality of the page that they were viewing. The meter worked by giving each page a score from 0 to 10. Google’s intent of users being able to determine which pages were better quickly was abused and a new economy was made. Google’s PageRank meter created a new economy of link selling. This economy was where people bought links to quickly improve their PageRank score. Google tried to fight the people trying to spam links everywhere, but the economy grew to big and people were putting links anywhere and everywhere in order to increase the score of the PageRank. The link spam became such a problem that people complained to Google and Google ended up trying to put an end to the link spamming. Google’s effort to end link spamming worked and the PageRank meter slowly faded away, but the link selling economy still exists because Google’s algorithm of ranking pages still depends somewhat on the PageRank score.
This article talks about the topic of PageRank. PageRank depends on the number of links to and from a page and which the reason the link selling economy was created. The PageRank meter that was created by Google provided a concrete and visible score for the people to actually increase the PageRank by selling and buying links. Buying and Selling links is a practical way to increase the PageRank score but it does not give an accurate value because people can just pay to increase the score. This is why the economy was created and still exists even after the PageRank meter from Google disappeared. Also, because of the link selling economy the current algorithms for ranking pages no longer depend only of the PageRank scores.
LINK: RIP Google PageRank score: A retrospective on how it ruined the web