Bill Slawski recently discussed an update to a Google patent concerning PageRank, a critical algorithm influencing site rankings and explaining the varying performance of different websites.
How Does This Affect Link Building?
This shift has been changing the landscape for link building for some time. The algorithms mentioned relate closely to the Penguin Algorithm. This impacts link building by calculating link distances between authoritative, spam-free sites and those they link to, categorizing these links by topic.
For effective link building, the best link comes from a site as close as possible to the most authoritative and high-quality site within that niche, which varies across different niches. This redefines what constitutes an "authority site."
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An untrustworthy site typically struggles to gain links from sites closest to trusted and authoritative sources in their topics, resulting in greater link distance.
If Google revealed a site’s PageRank score today, it would be largely irrelevant in less-populated niches, where fewer linking sites exist to boost PageRank significantly, thus giving smaller niche sites a ranking advantage.
This algorithm allows smaller niche topic sites to surpass larger, more heavily linked sites, redefining the approach to ranking. It shifts the focus from acquiring the most noteworthy and authoritative link to pinpointing links closest to the most authoritative sites relevant to the desired ranking topic.
What Has Changed With PageRank?
While the patent doesn’t introduce much change, it notes an author connected to another patent on methodologies for computing link distances. The abstract explains a method for discovering multiple shortest paths within a web graph, dividing resources into shards assigned to servers for parallel distance calculations.
Why Plumbing Affects PageRank
Scaling these computations is vital for large-scale seed set algorithms, an issue the patent update highlighted: the need for a ranking method that employs a diversified seed page set while overcoming previous limitations.
Is Google Introducing a Bias Using "Trusted" Sites?
This algorithm maps links between web pages, starting from Google’s most authoritative and spam-free sites, essentially striving to create a spam-free Internet map. Unlike past implementations, it’s a more advanced concept focused on page distance from trusted sites.
Why Use a Trusted Seed Set?
By using a "trusted" seed set, the patent defines parameters for what counts as an authority site for a specific topic, aligned with the Topical Trust Rank paper. Topical Trust Rank adjusted for big site bias by fragmenting the web into shards, enabling even small niche sites to act as authority sites in their fields and link to related sites, giving them a chance to rank well due to their niche authority.
Is Google’s Algorithm a Topical Trust Rank Algorithm?
No, unlike trust rank algorithms, Google’s method doesn’t assign "Trust" to web pages, which propagates like PageRank through links. Instead, it starts from trusted sites without directly spreading trust.
Google’s Patent Does Not Use the Word Trust
The patent doesn’t employ "trust" as a noun, but rather treats "Trusted" as a qualifier for sites deemed legitimate and spam-free, serving as reference points for measuring link distances. This algorithm ranks pages based on their distance from trusted sites, not on the propagation of trust.
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