Google has you fooled; the negative impact of PageRank.

It’s Friday Morning, 3:38am, and Googlebots everywhere are in frenzy mode. The databases are stirring, and someone, somewhere is receiving a PageRank update. AND IT DOESN'T MATTER... Are you excited yet? Google’s definition of PageRank PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.Translation:In the most simplistic approach every website has multiple votes. Each vote is an external link. If 50,000 websites link to this article with the anchor text “Google has you fooled”. Google would look at this article as the authority on “Google has you fooled”… that is if no other website has links to it with the anchor text “Google has you fooled”. You can see how this might get complicated if there are 1 million websites competing for that search term. Combine this with the fact that Google takes this “total vote” strategy and smashes it together with the value (PageRank) of the websites voting themselves; you’ve got a hairy situation here and one hell of an algorithm.Google goes on further to state that: Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

read more | digg story