The Effects of Selling Links and Trust on Google’s PageRank Algorithm
“A Reminder About Selling Links on PageRank”
In class, we learned a lot about how the PageRank Algorithm worked, as well as its many uses in search engine functionality. Briefly mentioned, however, were its weaknesses. We learned about the heavy dependence of PageRank upon links, as they were in the very formula for calculating it. Since they can be easily inserted and removed from a website, this has led to people selling artificial links to highly-ranked sites in order to improve the PageRank of the website. This is a major problem, and has been addressed by Google in an interesting and surprisingly effective way.
Google hasn’t exactly disclosed their methods for discovering linkselling, but they have made clear their consequences. The article, a statement released by official Google Webmaster, explains that websites accused of linkselling will have lost Google’s “trust,” which has consequences including lower Page Rank, and websites accused of buying these links have the option of either losing trust, removing the links, or designating those links as not affecting PageRank with a simple HTML attribute. Interestingly, once the links have been removed or changed, the website must submit a reconsideration request to be reviewed manually by a Google employee before being approved. This manual approval is surprising, because of its inefficiency in dealing with a large number of requests, and this appears to imply that the actual practice of linkselling is well-dealt with by Google, to the point where any problems that arise can be dealt with by hand.
However, this isn’t to say the problem is minor. When researching the topic and searching for articles with Google itself, I came upon some strange results when I looked up the term “page rank links”; one of the very first results was a website which claimed to effectively host a marketplace for buying and selling links, as well as many other goods which should probably not be sold. I thought this was not only interesting but also ironic. Even more interesting: upon searching the exact term copied from my history, hours later, the website appeared to be eliminated from the results entirely. Whether this is a sign of weakness or strength of Google’s PageRank algorithm isn’t quite clear, but it definitely makes for a fascinating subject.