PageRank Manipulation and What Google Does to Fight it.
Google’s PageRank, while extremely useful, has also had several flaws that have allowed it to be manipulated. However, Google has found ways to counter this manipulation and make their search results more relevant to their users.
One way in which sites would manipulate system would be by selling links to other sites. Larger sites with high reputations would sell links to other sites trying to boost their PageRank. Google eventually took notice of this and began penalizing sites that did this. *In an article from 2007, It was reported that Google had begun to lower the PageRank of such sites or sometimes outright block them from their search engine.
In the following years, Google began to further refine their search engine through a series of updates which would both help quality sites and keep out spam. In 2011, Google released the Panda update. *An interview with a Google employee revealed that in this update, they had real people look at sites and then asked them a series of questions about the quality and degree of trust they had for these sites. They would then use this information to find better ways to have computers tell the difference between sites that need more attention and those that need less. Google released the Penguin update soon after. In this update, Google found ways to better detect spam with the use of keywords from the sites and other user information. As smartphone rose in popularity, Google continued to adapt.
Even though Google eventually decided to discontinue the ability for users to see the PageRank of sites, the updates released before gave us an insight into the flaws of the PageRank algorithm and what Google did to fight these things. With the information from class, I can understand why selling links would be an issue for Google search and why there was the need to take into account human ranking, keywords and information other than authority/hub scores in order to uphold the quality of the search results.
Links:
*Selling Links: https://searchengineland.com/official-selling-paid-links-can-hurt-your-pagerank-or-rankings-on-google-12360
*Article on Panda (Includes interview): https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/panda-update/
Penguin: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/09/penguin-is-now-part-of-our-core.html
Panda and Penguin: https://www.thedrum.com/industryinsights/2018/06/26/10-blue-links-voice-search-how-google-has-evolved-and-seo-followed