Keyvan Nayyeri

Google PageRank has been a an important factor for many web visitors to recognize popular websites on the web specifically in the search results. This rank is calculated based on a set of different complex formulas that have undergone several major and minor modifications in the past years. This has been an ongoing progress for PageRank formula in order to keep it from deviation, and improving its quality as a recognition factor.

Google has been trying to emphasize on the content, quality, and the real popularity in calculation of the PageRank, and has been avoiding some fake hacks to cheat the formula or at least these have been their primary goals when defining and applying the formula.

The most challenging point against this formula is the activities of some webmasters and spammers to improve their ranks without providing the valuable content to absorb popularity. Back in 2003-2005 era the most common method of spamming targeted this area to quickly improve the PageRank. From this point, Google applied many changes in the formula to stop these spammers and webmasters from wasting their time on doing anything other than providing the valuable content.

It’s Google’s tradition to recalculate ranks on a regular basis with new modifications, and with the most recent data. The last update happened in the latest days of December 2008 when they applied significant changes in the formula that affected almost all the websites.

In the past few days after the update I’ve been monitoring the new ranks for some sites as well as the type of the site and the way that it receives its traffic. My main reason to keep an eye on such changes is the direct effect that it may have on online spamming and the way that I should manipulate my spam rules on Waegis.

In essence, I should say that the recent update in the PageRank was the worst one that I’ve ever seen, and it has had such a bad effect on the web. Not only it cannot represent the quality for web pages anymore but also it has opened new doors for spammers to easily promote their sites.

One of the early things that I tried to evaluate was the capability of the factor to recognize the level of content on a site and/or webpage. We all know that Google has been officially moving from site-wide ranks to per-page ranks, so it could make sense to reduce the influence of homepage ranks in the new updates. But after all, the story was different because I still have not been able to realize that how this PageRank relates to the quality and/or popularity of the content.

Here is a simple story that makes you laugh: my blog rank has dropped to 4 while my Twitter page has a 5 PageRank. Interestingly, Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack lost their 6 PageRank to get a 5, and their Twitter pages have the same rank as their blogs. More interestingly, my Twitter page has the same rank as Scott Hanselman’s blog, and his blog has lower rank than his Twitter page! What the mess!

Obviously, these ranks cannot represent anything about quality or popularity because we all know what’s going on and we all know about the quality and popularity of the sites! Of course, I checked over 50-60 sites and blogs in different categories and with different levels and I could be sure that this new rank is not a good sign for anything. There was a blog with less than 2-3 posts per months almost without any external reference and without a popularity, and it had the exact same 4 rank as my blog or Simone’s. He may have used spamming or other techniques to get the rank and this is a possible claim, but isn’t Google supposed to use formula to stop this hell?

Generally, the recent update in the PageRank has reduced higher ranks (5 or higher) and increased lower ranks (4 or lower), so many of the lower sites without a good quality have the same rank as higher sites with a good content. Moreover, I could extract that this new formula strongly depends on the number of external links and doesn’t care about the type of link and other parameters that may be pretended. In my opinion the way that new formula works is very similar to how it was working in the fist days.

The other aspect is the influence of this change on the web and the way that it has damaged our web by encouraging spammers. Unfortunately, my Waegis statistics after the update show that the spammers are smoothly transiting from their older style to a newer style that emphasizes on the holes in this new formula, and somehow they use their spamming style that was common in 2004-2005.

As you may have noticed, in the latest days of 2008 some companies had started public programs to give out prizes to web users who go to sites and leave comments with some keywords. I may write a separate post about this dirty business, but it’s good to know that this last update in the PageRank formula helped these companies very well, and they could achieve their goals faster!

Honestly, I never been positive with the topic of SEO and page rank stuff and I’m a big advocate of quality and content. Unfortunately, Google PageRank has proven to be a bad tool rather than a good one because it’s been a source of dirty business. I mean that its disadvantages has outweighed its advantages after all. From a logical point of view, Google should put its emphasize on the quality and avoid opening holes for anyone to use any technique to cross the longer path of content providing! I don’t know what’s the point in the existence of a business around SEO but it looks like that this industry is just burgeoning!

As the final conclusion, if you like me think that Microsoft is the only software elephant that does stupid things, you’re absolutely wrong, because Google is worse! They should promote their Ph.Ds for this genius formula!