Why we shouldn’t forget about PageRank in 2019
One of the reasons that PageRank is no longer the official method Google uses to rank pages is that many website owners would take advantage of the system to artificially boost their ranking, which is something this article talks about. As we learned in class, the more more links pointing to your page, the higher its PageRank, especially if those links have high PageRank themselves. Having other pages link to the pages created to boost your own PageRank is even more effective. However, PageRank seems to still be a very useful and powerful tool, as the article mentions evidence that Google is still using PageRank and is still updating rankings.
The article also dives into some ways to increase PageRank, despite it no longer being visible. Based on what we learned in class, it seems that the most direct way to increase PageRank would be to have more pages link to the website you want to increase. Having these pages that link to the website you want to increase link only to that website is beneficial as well, as it allows the main site to get the full PageRank value of the site that is linking to it. One of the pieces of advice the article mentions is indeed having high PageRank links to your website. It also mentions that some pages can have a negative PageRank, something not talked about in class. It seems like this would be possible through Google doing its own quality checking for links, like what was briefly mentioned when talking about GSP and checking for ad quality.
link: https://searchengineland.com/why-we-shouldnt-forget-about-pagerank-in-2019-315443