Page 2 - Page rank must die

I agree with this post.

The concept of Pagerank will not die. Search, in a way, is a ratings game. Highly rated sites are visited more often and are considered more credible. All the Pagerank does is try to measure these "ratings".

As an Internet surfer, this simple way of organizing sites into "ratings" provides me with immense help. If today, backlinking is a major strategy in improving ratings, tomorrow the same may not be true. The Internet changes not just because of technological improvements. There are also multitudes of behavioral shifts to be considered on the part of web masters and surfers alike. If I were Google, of course I would study all these developments and make appropriate changes. If it becomes feasible to customize search based on a surfer's on-line tendencies, then such input can be used to define the new algorithm. The algorithm answers the "how" and can be expected to evolve continuously; the Pagerank concept answers the "what" and should remain stable.

Similarly, webmasters and business owners should not lose sight of the proper objectives. Our goal should be to be "highly rated" by our customers and business partners. Methodologies, as history dictates, are fleeting. The focus should be on the mission, not the methods. In our preoccupation with getting back links, high positioning and higher pageranks, it may happen that we mistake those as the "ends" and not the "means". That's why we sometimes get overly anxious when an expected Google dance is due. We want to see if our tactics worked to increase back links and the like whereas the proper mindset should be determining customer satisfaction for example. When we implement new techniques, we shouldn't just ask whether the method will increase our search rank by a few notches; we should ask whether the technique contributes to brand building and whether it results in a sustainable competitive advantage.

I hope this helps ease our collective Google-caused anxiety. ;-)

As the originator of this thread, I can see that it has caused lots of opinions and thouhts. On reflection the title is confusing. It is probably clear that "page rank" will not die, but my original reasoning, that backlinking as a major factor to page rank, still holds true. This element has been ore or less negated by the ludicrous number of back links people are obtaining.

Having said that, what then distinguishes one site from another. I guess this has to be content and on-site optimisation. Or maybe google will just drop backlinks from obvious link directories, i.e pages that have no, or little, content other than links.

How delicious. Sites get high ratings because . . . they have high ratings.

That's not silly, it's true. (Well, it's also silly.) That is precisely the crux: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer--and wealth and poverty are determined initially, as in the real world, not by merit or achievement but by connections.

projectphp, your write I defined, in a detailed, example driven way what relevance is to me, yet you continue not to. Why?

Am I such a miserably poor writer that you cannot understand my simple statement that the whole point is that determining what relevance for search terms consists in is not something so simple that it can can be tossed off in a forum post. PageRank can, and that is a clear indication of its shallowness. It will take a roomfull of clever, trained persons working for six months to derive an accurate, meaningful way to rationally and reliably determine relevance, and how to measure and serve it.

The analogy is made between building a house and building an SE. If you are the foreman on a major construction job , do you work from blueprints and specifications drawn up by expert engineers and architects focussed on this project, or do you change your work goals from hour to hour based on the remarks of every passerby who says "Hey, you need to put a whosis there on that thingamjig"?

Now Google assuredly has, not roomsfull, but buildings full of clever, trained persons--but they are wedded to a deficient underlying technology and seem unwilling or psychologically unable to look at entire new techniques.

Elsewhere here I provided a link to a fairly recent patent by google on "LocalRank". I am too tired by this hour to look it up yet again (I discussed it on another forum, too), but it should be easy to find. You might see there some factual information on what Google does and how.

I am continually amazed by the bizarre remarks that people set forth on SEO forums just as if they were proven and accepted fact. As Casey Stengel famously said, "You could look it up." But scarcely anyone does.

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Eric Walker

Really? I thought PageRank, the mathematical formulae was a measure of "importance" that was not specific to a term.


As am I.

Yet I fail to see how reading and/or quoting a patent is anymore relevant. I read the patent application, the threads @ WMW and "did the maths". Do Google use "LocalRank"? Who really knows? The proof positive has yet to be presented, IMHO. Do you perhaps have some you would like to share?


Really? Anchor text is/was revolutionary. Ditto PageRank.

So, I am left asking, where / what are these "new techniques" you speak of?


Rubbish!!! It takes two seconds: the users finds what they are after. That is an impossible goal, as if I search for "dog" what do i want? How does this differ if I write "dogs"? Do I just want more ;)

Bottom line: users define relevance, and on less words, relevance is best served with variety. Relevance is not a tangible thing that can be accurate repeated from person to person, let alone word to word.

So, I keep coming back to variety. And there, Google is excellent!!

You thought wrong. PageRank is a measure of one thing: the number of other pages that link to a given page, weighted by their PR, the whole calculated (necessarily) in a multi-step iterative process. The defective theory on which Google is based is that inbound linkage does, in some way, imply "importance", and that was perhaps true for a brief period after Google's rise to prominence (which is what allowed it to rise to prominence), but became utterly untrue as soon as it was generally recognized as the basis for Google's rankings.

The very fact that the source of the link can be purely artificial (in the sense that the link would not exist if Google's PR methodology did not) is why Google, in an attempt to put a band-aid on leprosy, devised the LocalScore technique outlined in that patent application: it tries to place substantially greater emphasis on links from within the same general class as the page being ranked. It is, of course, as naive as Google's original proposition, in that all it will generate is the buying/selling/trading of "same class" links, which does zipola toward measuring or verifying any logical connect between the sites, which is supposed to be the point. In consequence, the rich will now get even richer, and, of course, the poor even poorer.

No, I don't and no one does; but you have again quite missed the point. As I explained above, LocalScore is an attempted fix that is as doomed as the original concept it is trying to fix. If SEO experiments suggest that it is in place--and someone will do those sometime soon, you can be sure--then the SEO professionals will be yet better able to artificially promote sites. (Nothing against them, or us: if it's there lying on the table, you pick it up and put it in your pocket.)

My reading of the dictionary suggests that "revolutionary" is inappropriate, but that's immaterial. The large point is that as methods of determining "relevance", they had failure built into them--they could be effective only for so long as their existence and general nature was not widely known, which wasn't really very long. And, now that an entire industry has grown up around gaming Google, "fixes" will have even shorter half-lives.

Well, Cap'n, I can't answer for you. But if I search for a term, I usually want one of two kinds of information: I may simply want some basic fact--Abraham Lincoln's actual birthdate, perhaps; that, I will say, Google can provide me right now, readily--but, of course, so can every search engine, and so they all readily could before The Lads had their brainstorm.

The second type of information is deep and wide knowledge about a subject: I want to read as much good, relevant, explanatory, informative material on the topic as I can find, to educate myself about it and to acquire a feel for the spectrum of opinions on the topic. There, Google (and its apers) fail, badly. Yes, the first few articles turned up usually have a decent percentage of reasonably relevant pages; but, as I have said time and again, the test is not whether the top pages found are mostly relevant, but whether most of the relevant pages are in the top found. Those are two radically different propositions, and the second does not describe what Google returns.

I have many, many times over the years done searches looking for information of the second kind, and I know from that experience that it is only by tediously wading through hundreds of hits that I am likely to find all (well, not even all, but at least many) of the pages of the sort I seek. Many excellent pages on topics are to be found in the second and third and fourth hundred, and even beyond.

Why? Because they are pages made by individuals or small organizations totally innocent of any idea of "PageRank" or "backlinks". They have few or none because they have sought few or none. And people who could recognize their virtue and give them links based on that merit do not because they do not even know the sites exist because the sites don't have the PR to rank highly enough to be found. That is a textbook example of a "vicious circle", with an emphasis on the "vicious".

In short: to get great PR you have to start with good PR. You cannot--save in rare fluke cases where some big-time site stumbles by chance on a page and touts it--bootstrap your way into good PR, and hence a decent placement, by sheer quality of site.

If that is not clear enough, sorry. But I am about typed-out on this matter, and don't like repeating myself. Make of it all what you like. This is my stop, and I'm getting off the trolley here.

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Eric Walker

Well, after all the talk of "doomed" and "flawed", I for one have learnt nothing. Not about how it could be done better, not about LocalScore as it is now called (apparently), nothing. Oh well, at least it is over!!!

Wow, this is a great thread. Thanks for all of the time and thought that you put into these posts.... and nice to see some new members jumpin in.