PageRank Manipulation and How Google Fight it
In order to provide relevant and accurate search results, Google uses a PageRank system to rank web pages. However, this PageRank algorithm can also be manipulated by certain webmasters to rank their websites higher on the search engine
One way to increase the PageRank of a website is to have many other popular websites reference it. Therefore, some webmasters would spam blogs and forums with comments linking to their websites to increase the number of references. This will increase the Authority Score of the website during the Hub-Authority Update and thus increase the PageRank of the website. Also, some people would pay owners of already popular websites to advertise their websites, profiting off the high Hub score of the popular website to increase the Authority Score of their website. To combat this, Google used the feature of “Nofollow” and “Dofollow” links. Any links tagged as Nofollow does not help with a website’s PageRank. Google marks links on sites such as blogs, social media, forums, and advertisements as “Nofollow”, so spamming will not rank a site higher on a PageRank. Google also strictly punishes websites that buy links to increase their PageRanks, ranging from stripping their PageRank to Sandboxing the website, meaning not showing it on the search results list.
Another way to increase the PageRank is to match with the keywords a user is searching. To increase website ranking for a certain keyword, some webmasters would spam their website with the keyword repeated over and over again. This is called Keyword Stuffing. However, this technique does not work now, and it is not proven if the number of keywords on a webpage is correlated with an increase in PageRank.
In 2020, Google has deployed spam-fighting Artificial Intelligence to protect users from spam websites. The AI scans the web pages and removes spam before showing the results to users. According to Google, AI has reduced spam sites with auto-generated and scraped content” by more than 80%.
Sources:
- Can Google PageRank be Manipulated for Better Rankings? By Roger Montti: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-pagerank-manipulation/369854/#close
- Toxins & Search Engine Spam Penalties by George Nguyen: https://searchengineland.com/guide/seo/violations-search-engine-spam-penalties
- What is Google PageRank and its Relevance to SEO? By Jason Roy: https://seositecheckup.com/articles/what-is-google-pagerank-and-its-relevance-to-seo
- How Good Is Google at Detecting Rank Manipulation by Timothy Carter? https://www.entrepreneur.com/science-technology/how-good-is-google-at-detecting-rank-manipulation/392445
- What Is a Nofollow Link? Here’s A Simple Plain English Answer by Brian Dean: https://backlinko.com/nofollow-link
How we fought Search spam on Google in 2020 by Google Search Central Blog: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/how-we-fought-search-spam-2020