google update 4.23 in progress!

That is what I was saying earlier - the weight that this forum adds to moving the "real" page forward - which is at 19 today - bear in mind this site [click on the link below in my signature] has only 16 pages against digital point of some 17600 pages and 15000+ back links!! - so the authority of dp is what takes it there at the moment. Our page was nowhere 1.5 weeks ago - the aim is no1 in 2 months

 

By weighting the significance of a link.

Google's theory--long since rendered inane by the mere existence of Google, but it's apparently what they still rely on--is that the "significance" of a page can validly be measured by the number of links pointing in at it, on the now largely void assumption that links are "votes" by webmasters on the quality and relevance of other pages to their own sites.

Presumably, in evaluating a given page for its relevance to a given query, Google uses the content of the page to initially identify it as relevant, then uses backlink data to assign a "credibility value" to that page. That credibility value, one would think, is based on giving each backlink a weight based on the originating page's PR, then summing all the weighted link counts.

That is: if, for simplicity, four pages link to one of mine, and those four pages have PRs of 5, 6, 3, and 1, the backlink weight given by Google would be 3.75, or something proportional to that number. (Mind, I know all this is gross oversimplification, but my reckoning is that the principle is roughly as described.) Putting it another way, the value for SERP purposes of 20 links all from pages of PR 6 would be roughly equal to the value of 40 links from pages all PR 3. I would imagine that in reality it is nothing like so straightforwardly linear as that--more likely there is an exponential "sliding scale", since a PR 6 is not really "twice as good" as a PR 3.

But, as I said before, if the originating page's PR does not factor into any sort of weighting of backlink significance, then why is there a "PR" at all? Google did not devise the PR solely to put color bars in their directory, nor yet to merely amuse and befuddle webmasters. The word "rank" has a clear, well-known meaning: what, then, is Google "ranking" with PR? What could it be except the "weight" of a page for valuing links originating from it?

Is there some other explanation I am missing?

(When I said that "Google's theory [has been] long since rendered inane by the mere existence of Google", I mean that once the site-making world becamse aware that the 800-pound gorilla of searching was using backlinks as a SERP major criterion, those links by and large ceased to indicate what Google's theory still pretends they do, that is, personal judgements on quality and relevance; now, they just indicate, in the main, that webmasters are catering to Google.)

 

FYI FWIW: I think you are asking some very good questions Eric - while anchor text surely means "something", I agree with you that PR (as much as people seem to focus solely on that) MUST account for something.

I do agree that backlinks seem to be outa control - as I have said previousely, I seriousely question if a keyword search for information on "weber bbqs" should yield this forum as the #7 entry (yea, I know I'm the BBQ guy (see .sig), but this is independant of that) since there actually is very LITTLE information about Weber BBQ's.

Again, if I were a developer at Google, I'd be looking at this exact example and say it is an example of where we "goofed" ... i.e. what can we do to tweek the underlying algorithm to fix it so the results are more relevent - I've seen Shawn use that term before in these types of discussions.

I would not be surprised to see some sort of de-valuation of backlinks in the future ... seems like some sort of theming is needed, but we'll see if that is pull-off-able.

Boy, it would just be awesome to sneak a peak at Google's source code to see what the weighting factors are for various things - you just know some of them read these forums and must get quite a chuckle out of our black-box analysis of how the internals work.

alek

 

I'm going take one more pass at this thing.

There is no doubt that when Larry Page developed and conceived PageRank he thought that people would only link to pages that were closely related in subject and theme. BTW it is generally agree that the "page" in PageRank stands for the inventors name and does not imply that it is a ranking of the page.

So it should have been possible to judge the relevance of a page based on the number of links to that page. In turn if a page had good content it would attract links and so the more links a page had the better the content and if that page linked to another page that other page must really be relevant.

I have no doubt that early SERP position were influenced and determined by PR.

However, as soon as this became apparent webmasters and SEO practitioners started to concentrate on link building and because there is no keyword or relevance used in the PR calculation they garnered backlink from wherever they could. In very short order PR lost it value as a potential measure of relevance.

So Google had to find another way to judge the relevance of a link. They did this by looking at the anchor text. The anchor text tells the prospective clicker what to expect to find as a result of clicking on the link. Google also wants to know what to expect to find at the end of the link. PR doesn't give them a clue. PR doesn't tell them a damn thing about what the target site is about.

Google clearly calculates two values from a link. One is the PR. The other is the relevance score. Many observers besides myself feel that Google is placing more and more of their emphasis on the relevance score and less and less on the PR score.

In fact there is one theory that says that Google may be infringing a Stanford University patent by using PageRank and that they may be trying to abandon it altogether before they go public and become potential targets for a lawsuit.

In any case if you are depending on PR alone to drive your site to the top of the SERPs you are going to be disappointed. Clearly PR no longer can be used as a measure of relevance. Google knows this. Therefore they have dramatically reduced the impact of PR in their SERP placement.

 

No sane person doubts that. E. R. Eddison is, in literate circles, neither a really famous author, nor a really obscure one: Google reports about 9,560 hits on a search for his name as given (its usual form, though he is sometimes referred to as Eric Eddison). The #1 SERP for that name is mine, a page of my site. Shawn's Google tool tells us that that #1 page has zero backlinks, and a PR of zero. Q.E.D.

But if Google is, with some perfunctory bow to sheer sanity, devaluing PR, then we are, in a curious way, possibly even worse off, for now they will have to more heavily weigh link anchor text--the problem with which is that numerous "webmasters" are brain-dead when it comes to anchor text, yet the Google backlink-emphasis places a page's relevance dead in the hands of those brain-dead. Stuff like "this site" and "[1]" and "interesting" from backlinkers will thoroughly diffuse the significance of their having linked at all.

I don't claim that assigning relevance is an easy thing to do: fortunes will be made and lost on who can answer that question effectively. But what I think is clear is that it is time and past time to just utterly chuck the past, instead of trying to tweak the extant algorithms, a process much like expecting a tweaking of horseshoing techniques to have a major impact on pasenger and freight transportation.

My gut feeling is that in the end nothing replaces human judgement, and that at some point, sometime, someone--two guys drinking beer and eating cold pizza in a garage somewhere as we speak--will figure out that the idea is to take a large, reasonably sound human-judged database (not necessarily dmoz--there's Zeal, too) and use it as the starting point: find a clever way to algorithmically compare pages not in that directory with analogous ones that are, or something of that sort.

 

Great to hear

 

The Google updates are always anticipated, but if you keep doing what Google suggests, adding fresh content, and building your backlinks you should be fine

 

Maybe this topic is a bit old It is from 2004