Pagerank and Its implication for Websites Marketing Strategy
What constitutes an effective “search”? How do we obtain viable and useful information through Google? More importantly, how does Google decide what page comes top in the results? All these questions are often overlooked when we type our keywords in the search box; nevertheless, they are essential to determine the quality of our search results. In the article, the author quickly goes through the algorithm that Google adopts in generating the page ranks. Websites or pages are put into a popularity contest in which the one with the highest inbound and outbound links wins. There is a mathematical formula that Google runs to get the numbers. I find it very interesting because this pertains to what we learned in class on Link-based ranking. When we conduct a search on a specific category, there will be tons of results that correspond to the category. In order to rank them based on relevance, search engine looks at the number of endorsements of the page, which are the links that have previously referred to that page. However, it is not just a one way calculation, but rather the search engine tests the liability of the link that refer to the page by counting the endorsements of other pages that the link also refer to. To put in simple term, in class, we classify the results as authorities and the links that endorse the results as hubs. We filter the the authorities by relevance, not only do we need to count how many votes they have (hubs that mentioned them), but also how reliable are the hubs.
Back to the article, the author based on this feature of Google Pagerank, offers some advice on boosting websites’ rank. The first is to list the page on more popular websites. This has effects on both increasing the number of votes on authorities and increasing the chance of being endorsed by a reliable hub. The author then suggests on getting page reviewed by popular review sites; this, too, serves the purpose of increasing the reliability of the hub. What I find most interesting is the joint venture that author points out, in which the page should form a corporation with other business websites and exchange links. This is ultimately expanding the strong connected components that each page belongs to by connecting them. I find it much more effective than the other suggestions on the website since the page will benefit from the large components that it just became part of and gain more links from them. From my point of view, this should be an important marketing strategy for small business to consider when they try to launch their website for the first time.
Link to the article:http://seositecheckup.com/articles/what-is-google-pagerank-and-its-relevance-to-seo