What is Google PageRank?
In class, we learned about page rank. A page’s importance is determined by how many links lead to that page, and each link counts as a vote. At the same time, it only seems to make sense that pages with original high rank have their votes count for more. Their reasoning as to why links to a certain page make that page important is that if a lot of links lead to that page, it is most likely an indication that the page is a good authority and has a good source of information. Logically speaking, if a page was not important, nobody would reference it, and it would never be linked. On top of that, if pages are already seen as good authorities, any pages that it links to are probably an even better authority.
Besides just the things we learned in class, this article dives deeper into the flaws of Google PageRank. One flaw is the ability of people to create Google Bombs, which occur when a bunch of people will try to create many links to a certain page in order to increase its importance. Another issue is link farming, in which a website will just contain a ton of random, unassociated links, probably to increase the importance of the pages it links. However, Google has taken active measures to control these issues, and having a link farm linking to your page is nothing to fear.
In my opinion, I think PageRank is a clever way of helping Google searches and determining a page’s importance. Being able to link to a page is such a powerful tool, yet at the same time, is usually only done with good reason, making PageRank make sense.