The Mentalist
Power Member
- May 8, 2013
- 740
- 272
I've seen so many posts about PageRank recently, I feel obligated to clear up some confusion.
PageRank goes back to the algorithm Brin and Page developed nearly 20 years ago at the start of Google. It still represents the algorithm that is used today, Google has obviously changed the PageRank algorithm, but in the end it is still an algorithm that ranks pages (hence the name PageRank).
The problem is, though, that a universal ranking of websites isn't very helpful in creating a search engine. It also depends on the query (what you type into Google) and other information. So technically, PageRank has always been the ranking score of a website (or website's page) for a given query instance.
The PageRank metric SEOers have used over the last years was just that, a metric. The thing is we never even really knew what the PageRank metric was, we just hoped it represented some output of the actual PageRank algorithm. There was nothing inherently magical about PageRank. PageRank itself never contributed to any website's rankings.
PageRank was simply a metric we blindly trusted to be valuable. In the last 5 years we've seen people getting their hands dirtier, and actually dissecting the link profiles of domains to better understand their SEO value, we should have been doing this all along (not saying that people never did this, but a majority weren't). Of course PageRank seemed to have some sort of correlation with a website's rankings, so we used it as a metric. But now that every website's PageRank is 0, nothing's changed, we simply don't have a metric to use that we shouldn't have been using in the first place!
So no, PageRank isn't gone, I'm sure the core PageRank algorithm (which is publicly available) has changed (well we know it has, obviously). It actually is very useful in ranking vertices in a graph based on in/out degree, and is commonly used in information retrieval today (I've implemented the algorithm a few times myself). I won't bore you with graph theory, but the dilemma it solves is actually fairly simple.
If you go to calculate the SEO value of all websites, you have to start with one. So you pick the first one, but wait, that website's SEO value depends on the SEO value of other websites linking to it, and the other websites it links to, so how is it possible to calculate the first website's SEO value when you haven't calculated the other websites' SEO value?
The answer is Gaussian elimination, but that takes too long to calculate given the entire web graph, so Google came up with an algorithm that calculates it faster, anyway read about the Random Surfer model if you get bored sometime, the proofs aren't too bad.
Anyway...
PageRank isn't dead, Google simply isn't giving us the useless metric anymore.
PageRank goes back to the algorithm Brin and Page developed nearly 20 years ago at the start of Google. It still represents the algorithm that is used today, Google has obviously changed the PageRank algorithm, but in the end it is still an algorithm that ranks pages (hence the name PageRank).
The problem is, though, that a universal ranking of websites isn't very helpful in creating a search engine. It also depends on the query (what you type into Google) and other information. So technically, PageRank has always been the ranking score of a website (or website's page) for a given query instance.
The PageRank metric SEOers have used over the last years was just that, a metric. The thing is we never even really knew what the PageRank metric was, we just hoped it represented some output of the actual PageRank algorithm. There was nothing inherently magical about PageRank. PageRank itself never contributed to any website's rankings.
PageRank was simply a metric we blindly trusted to be valuable. In the last 5 years we've seen people getting their hands dirtier, and actually dissecting the link profiles of domains to better understand their SEO value, we should have been doing this all along (not saying that people never did this, but a majority weren't). Of course PageRank seemed to have some sort of correlation with a website's rankings, so we used it as a metric. But now that every website's PageRank is 0, nothing's changed, we simply don't have a metric to use that we shouldn't have been using in the first place!
So no, PageRank isn't gone, I'm sure the core PageRank algorithm (which is publicly available) has changed (well we know it has, obviously). It actually is very useful in ranking vertices in a graph based on in/out degree, and is commonly used in information retrieval today (I've implemented the algorithm a few times myself). I won't bore you with graph theory, but the dilemma it solves is actually fairly simple.
If you go to calculate the SEO value of all websites, you have to start with one. So you pick the first one, but wait, that website's SEO value depends on the SEO value of other websites linking to it, and the other websites it links to, so how is it possible to calculate the first website's SEO value when you haven't calculated the other websites' SEO value?
The answer is Gaussian elimination, but that takes too long to calculate given the entire web graph, so Google came up with an algorithm that calculates it faster, anyway read about the Random Surfer model if you get bored sometime, the proofs aren't too bad.
Anyway...
PageRank isn't dead, Google simply isn't giving us the useless metric anymore.
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