Secrets to Google’s PageRank
For several months, JC Penney took the No. 1 spot for many search terms on Google. In fact, even when users searched “Samsonite carry on luggage,” JC Penney would appear on the list above Samsonite.com. This meant that it had an incredibly high PageRank; however, the company achieved this through black-hat services or methods that Google considers cheating. It was interesting to learn how much PageRank affects the web. Although Google eventually manually decreases JC Penney’s search position as a result of its abuse of web links to the site, JC Penney was certainly able to gain a margin of profit. By increasing its PageRank, it was equivalent to having the best online advertisement a company could have. For example, JC Penney received around 3.8 million hits for every month it was No.1 for the search word “dresses.” Although the company does not reveal its profits, clearly, this increased website visit would help advertise the company’s products. At the same time, the article pointed out how difficult it was for Google to catch such incidents, which was why JC Penney remained No.1 for many search terms for a few months. The article notes that “there are 200 million domain names and a mere 24,000 employees at Google.” The spamming is a continuous battle that Google employees are trying to catch; however, the lack of engineers and staff make it impossible for Google to catch every incident right away. At the same time, when caught there are serious consequences. Before Google took action Feb. 1 JC Penney’s average position for 59 search terms was 1.3, on Feb.8 it became 4, and on Feb. 10 it was 52. Google quickly and efficiently brought down JC Penney’s position after noticing the company’s attempt to cheat in the PageRank algorithm.
In class, we learned about the concept of PageRank. PageRank is a calculation that evaluates the quality and quantity of links to another webpage to determine the relative score of the page’s importance to other pages on the web. PageRank describes the importance of one webpage compared to another. In this article, it shows how JC Penney attempted to cheat Google’s PageRank algorithm in order to allow the company to have a higher PageRank, which would allow more users to find the company. By having many other sites link to JC Penney, this allowed the company to show up as one of the first few sites when users searched for terms such as “dresses” or “bedding” even though there are other companies such as Macy that may be more relevant. PageRank is determined by how many links to the site there are and the links are essentially “votes of approval.” Thus, by paying other sites to have links that directed to JCPenney.com, the company was able to increase its PageRank and elevate its position for many search terms on Google.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html