Google has always claimed that it has maintained an unbiased algorithm in its Google Page Rank but just recently FT.com has made a revelation that Google’s staff has the ability to change its ranking. Is it really possible to manipulate the Google Page Rank?
The PageRank is basically a link analysis algorithm named after its developer, Larry Page. It is used by Google Internet search engine and reflects our views regarding the importance of web pages. It counts the number of links to a website from another website and determines the importance of that website. Thus, based on this algorithm important web pages receives a higher PageRank and appears at the top of the search results.
Here’s a clip from Matt Cutts explaining it all – Biased or Not?
In other words, we can directly say that a PageRank results from a collective vote or some sort of a ballot from all the other pages in the web to determine how important a certain web page is. And like in any election or surveys, results may always be manipulated.
As a matter of fact, some people are trying to use various strategies to manipulate PageRank results in order to change or improve the search results. Knowing the presence of such concerted efforts to manipulate the results shown by PageRank has affected the reliability of the PageRank concept.
As revealed by the website FT.com, Google employees were the ones directly involved in these manipulations. Accordingly, Google employees have the direct control to promote or even completely delete a site from the Google index thus, resulting to a change in the PageRank result of certain web pages.
This has been a major problem encountered by Google at present since from the time PageRank was introduced; Google has maintained that its index rankings are accurate and unbiased. Google also claimed that they have used a practical approach to help improve search quality by using a technology that uses collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.
But because of this manipulation accusations raised against Google, it seems that Google is having a hard time because several companies are starting to file cases against Google claiming bias in Google results.
These rankings revealed in PageRanks are worth huge amounts of money for many websites and changes in these rankings can make or break a company’s business. Companies with a high page rank put them into a strong position to enter into a new market. No wonder some companies are considering legal actions against Google.
Will this be the end for PageRank? Let’s just wait and see how Google will be able to resolve this problem.
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Tags: google evil, google hack, google index rank, google manipulated, google money, google page rank, google seo
I don’t understand why people shout at google and their page rank system. They are owners of google and they can and may do anything. What is wrong here? Lets put it this way, I have a car, you want to drive with me for free. If I want to take you, I will and if I don’t – I wont. Easy as that. You don’t like Google page rank? Then go away :)
Well obviously Sipos Pal the competition laws of most countries don’t agree with your personal opinion. I think trying to compare Google’s position with private ownership of your car is being very naive. When this kind of thing happens it is only the consumers who suffer.