Ask HN: How Trustworthy is Google PageRank?
Wondering if anyone can give me some feedback on their experiences with SEO and their site PageRank, we have been feverishly working on optimizing our commerce site : http://www.off2.com for the past few months and went live in the UK earlier this week.
Weve been crawled by Google yesterday (i think!) and returned a Pagerank of 7. We previously had managed to get a PR4 with our static holding page through inbound links, optimization etc. Obviously we are very happy about a PR7 but I really want to know whether others have found that PR can sometimes be incorrect and adjusted by Google. I've checked over our inbound links to find some .edu sites which of course carry a lot of weight with their PR8's.
Would love to hear the thoughts on any reversals or sudden changes others have seen.
24 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 64.4 ms ] threadGoogle uses the internal PR value as one factor (out of reportedly hundreds) in determining the rank of a page in the search results.
The publicly visible one is, for all intents and purposes, an entertainment channel like, for example, Comedy Central. It is never an accurate reflection of the current PR value Google uses internally.
So what to do? Use the Webmaster Tools and authenticate your site. The Webmaster Tools give you a ton of data about how Google sees your site which is a lot more valuable from a little green progress bar.
PR is, very basically, a network analysis algorithm. A simple way of thinking about it is the random walk analogy: Imagine randomly browsing pages on the web by clicking on links, what's the probability of you landing on the page in question? The higher the chance of you randomly finding the page the higher its PR.
But again, this is a very very simplistic view and the actual algorithm is of course very very secret. The idea isn't though, and you can read the original paper by Brin and Page at http://cli.gs/qVDNYm .
I'm referring to the algorithm for calculating the rank of a hit in the search results. If there are hundreds of influences, then it seems overcomplicated.
That's not PageRank but the ranking algo.
If there are hundreds of influences, then it seems overcomplicated. Well it needs to be a general algo that works with all types of content, all fields of knowledge, work around all known types of spam, in all languages, while working on HTML quality.
Complicated? No, necessary.
That's what I'm referring to! Hehe. I feel insane. Am I really failing at communicating?
Let me try again: If the ranking algo considers hundreds of influences, then it is an overcomplicated mess!
In theory, you can view every search as a function of your query and all the web documents out there. This function is partially evaluated for a fixed universe of documents and super optimized.
Evaluating hundreds of parameters is common sense for machine learning tasks. If you look at the papers explaining how the top Netflix prize competitors achieve their score, this is again what they do: they run literally hundreds of algorithms over the dataset and then blend the results. And this is for a domain where their data is only (user, movie, rating, date) quadriplets.
Mine was that the solutions to machine learning problems are inherently messy (at least this is the state of the art).
"overcomplicated mess" seems to imply "it's a bad solution".
While Google's ranking system may be "bad" (they believe that it isn't good enough), "bad" or even "overcomplicated" doesn't follow from "hundreds of influences".
Consider the "design" of a common house cat. Its design is the result of thousands of influences.
It may be difficult for people to think about systems with hundreds of influences, but that's a people problem and doesn't imply that such systems are inferior to more understandable systems.
What properties of a design do you think are determined by the design process as opposed to its outcome?
> whereas the ranking algorithm's goal is to match text to relevant pages, which requires solving far fewer problems than a living creature
While "relevance" is the commonly used term, "utility" or "value" would be more accurate. And they're far more complicated than you seem to think.
There is no "best" search result for a given query. There's not even a best result for a given person. Add in their context, and you're getting close, but there are still other factors that are relevant to determining "best".
Part of it might just work like a spam filter, for example, so even single words could be factored into the algorithm. Just guessing, but there could be a rule like "if site contains the string '$$$' reduce rank by 0.5%" and so on - all automatically generated, just as it would happen in a spam filter.
Also take a look at SpamAssassin, I have heard it let's you manually combine configure and weigth all sorts of algorithms. At the end of the day, most of Google's employees concerned with improving the search results are probably doing just that most of the time.
Even if some Google researcher comes up with a new algo tomorrow, it will probably just be factored in, it won't simply replace the previous algorithms.
I think thats a good assumption reading up on it in more detail, the relevance of the rank itself is a very small factor in the performance of the site and its keywords etc.
I think we may have some relevant high worth links coming in that i wasnt previously aware of, our own link building campaign rarely acheived more than a PR5 or PR4 site so I will look into the backward links.
Our keyword market in travel is as anyone would expect extremely competitive so hopefully SEO over time will prove to be a good investment of our time and effort, we were just rather shocked this morning at the new crawled Pagerank!
To give you an example: I have a PR5 page that ranks in the top 10 for a 50m results query. The page has links from really (really) awesome sites (think multinational companies). Traffic from this query? Minimal. Why? It's not a commonly used keyword and certainly doesn't drive that many subscribers to the site.
We have started a review this week of our internal link structure and the use of more specific travel terms, ie 'holidays in tunisia' or 'package holidays in tunisia' for our deeper destination pages. Hopefully the relevancy of these search terms coupled with a well performing site should yield better results than we could ever anticipate for 'travel' or 'holidays' etc!!
Cheers for the input
And if you do have a an actual PR 7 in Google that is great. It means you have a lot of link authority. Use it by targeting certain key pages on your site for the keywords that will drive traffic.