The exponential nature of PageRank

Once the balls rolling it only gains speed

[TheDave]

A thought occurs to me just now, and I thought I'd share it with you all. I just used google to look up a very specific variety of widget, and posted a link to said widget in a forum. It was only for quick reference, so I didnt care which site I linked to, as long as it had the information. This gave me the thought that by having a higher PageRank, you are more likely to be found, and more likely to be linked to, thus more likely to gain PageRank, becoming even more visible, gaining more links.. well it just goes on :)

Ok, you can go back to waiting for the update now, I just thought I'd share that with you :)

[vitaplease]

You mean ranking high becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy?

The rich become richer?

(little to do with Pagerank though, more with Page Rank, IMO)

[yetanotheruser]

More worrying IMHO is if google spiderers results pages produced by sites that use the googleAPI, and therefore the google results..

The page comes high in listings on a page linked to as 'most popular searches' : "Blue Widgets" .. therefore it's getting another link, therefore more PR..

I think there was some discussion of this kind of feedback in the backrub paper, but it's been a while so I might be wrong..

I guess it's always the case that some people will be famous just for being famous.. Websites I guess are just the same ;)

Morning all :)

[CuriousWeb]

I agree it's the same thing as success breeding success. Do you think Yahoo! and Amazon do link campaigns? No because people link to them anyway...

[vitaplease]

Do not forget that there is an element of self-correction.

Searchers get fed-up with seeing the same results, look further down the Serps, or use more words in their search query, find something better and place a vote (link).

[Kennyh]

Success does indeed breed success - in life as well as in search engine ranking. That's a good thing because ultimately those who are prepared to spend time and effort producing good quality, keyword focussed, optimised content will succeed over those who are only interested in trying to scam the SEs to gain high rankings.

Bottom line? Spend as much time as you can developing 'expert' content, make sure each page is optimised and keyword focussed and you will succeed. For example, would you post a link on a forum or on your site to a page whose content you didn't trust? No, of course you wouldn't. So the exponential growth will only occur for sites with good content, regardless of their ranking.

I realise, that for 99% of posters on this forum, that's teaching my granny to suck eggs (as we say in Scotland), but it seems to me that it could do with being repeated on this thread.

[Pegasus]

I thought of that too :)

Where you get into a positive feedback loop.

However, you have to remember that all the other sites you're competing against are experiencing the same thing.

Google's rankings are comparative, not absolute.

[Dynamoo]

Yes, I have certain terms that I'm #1 for in Google. I find that the links add themselves for those terms.

However, because the size of the web grows all the time, these could be swallowed up in the general link "inflation" that must go on.

In other words, you'd only get a feedback loop when the inbound "votes" increase more quickly than the web is growing.

[killroy]

This is a natural and positive phenomenon. The whole idea of Page Rank in the first place is to provide you with popular material. The philosophy is after all, the more popular it is, the more popular it should be.

I exploit this in a commercial directory. By listing top trafficked entries in each category, their links are increased, thei rank higher in my results (and in google searches) and ultimately they are more popular and more visited... and so on...

Which only goes to show to my customers that money spend on a high ranking on my site... is well spend.

S. N.

[Critter]

There's one key issue being missed here: If your site is *good* and the person visiting it wants to link to it you'll get a positive feedback in place with which link farms/spammers can't compete.

OTOH, if your site isn't very worthy all that will happen is that you'll have people visit it then never link.

So, again, the quality/interface/speed/cleanliness of your site is what dictates how fast you'll go up in PR.

Peter

[BigDave]

I have a lot of fun each month seeing who adds links to me.

Once someone considers you an authoritative source, they will often links to you all the time. There are now two online magazine sites that are putting links to my site at the end of any article that has anything to do with my site. We're mentioned in forums all the time. All those little PR1-2 links add up.

The PR helps them find you, but you better have the content for them to want to link to you.

[Clovis]

thats awesome dave!

for those of you who may not yet be an authority in your field, a client of mine (who also does business by obtaining clients) uses press releases with links to their site to help the ever evolving PR to grow. averaging a major client/partnership acquisition per month sometimes bi-weekly, it works out well for them.

[Chef_Brian]

Hey Eveyone,

I think Dave hit it, create content that matters. With this large massive amount of content on the web you need to be different than the other guys AND you need to know what your talking about.

From that point there are things that you can do to incourage this kind of linking. Let your visitors know that they may link to your site for any reason they see fit.

One way I try to intese linking is by allowing anyone to post any of my recipes, articles or whatever to any site on the net.

I also let them know in a nice way that I do expect a link back to my site ;-)

Month after month I find more links point back to my recipe/chef site. It works very well, and at the same time those people who do link to my site are happy to have my content.

Cheers,

Brian