Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Surely a better idea is to rank on bookmarked sites - a true vote for a website...especially with the advent of online bookmarks through Google - although I'm sure there is still a way to manipulate this to your advantage, this has got to be an alternative to the linking system currently in existance.
I have submitted my sites to various directories, not to increase Pr but to get more traffic - I am fed up with having to check if the sites I am submitting are blacklisted to make sure I do not get penalised.
The idea behind it is that there is one vote for a web page per one link to that web page.
PageRank is a bit more complex - the "vote" of a link is weighted -- both by how much PR the linking page has and how many total links it holds.
I do understand your frustration with all the checking - but it seems to me it would be very easy to set up many Google accounts and tilt the bookmark scales.
Yeah I can understand that it would be easy to skew the results - I understand pagerank is more complex, but the basic idea behind it is still that you are voting for a website.
My point is that there are a lot of non-website owning people out there and they bookmarks sites like the rest of us - and surely a bookmark is a vote for a site, otherwise, why bookmark it!
I'm just really throwing an idea around and seeing what others think!
I'm not sure Google would have access to a solid enough database of information to work from. There's the toolbar of course, but I'm not sure it has access to this kind of information about user behaviour.
so long as you can find quickly site in the search engine again and again
Yeah, and click some poor soul's Adwords ad for the forty-eighth time!
Not to mention all the related privacy issues.
Surely a better idea is to rank on bookmarked sites - a true vote for a website...
If that was the scenario then I would be a 'passive voter' -- as I don't use bookmarks at all = not a single vote from me for any website (except my own of course) :)
A webmaster (one with a good, trusted, on-topic site) would not link to a poor quality resource.Really? That probably sounded like a good starting premise when Page & Brin founded Google, but it's long since been proven wrong.
Getting hundreds of bookmarks is easier than getting just one authority site to link to you.I don't know. The average surfer isn't likely to bookmark a site if they don't plan to return, even if you beg them to. But this does bring us around to the same problem as you have with using links as votes: Separating unnatural patterns of voting from natural, "organic" ones.
Bookmark sites I have seen really never got off the ground because as LifeinAsia pointed out 'easy for spammers' However if the group of data was large enough and had enough data from regular users I would think it would make an improvement to static content. Oh, google does have bookmarks on their toolbar.
A bookmark rank that also included a trust rank would be the way to go. Since bookmarks go to static pages requiring those pages to have time in the index would discourage spammers. If it is a web 2.0 application, using the bookmarks as first results by the user for the user (or group of users) then seeing whose bookmarks get used/searched the most (as an indication of lack of spam and quality) could be a method to establish the trust/quality rank of groups of bookmarks. If a college could get involved they would likely provide considerable good quality bookmarks, I would give the professors a trustrank of 10.
I think the basic concept of pagerank of severing up the pages that most people are likely to find by following links is sound.
I disagree because users don't blindly follow links.
In the 5 years I've been visiting WebmasterWorld I've never once clicked on the privacy policy (well except now to check the toolbar PR) but if we take things at face value, "the concept" is assuming that I am fairly likely to end up on that page - which is completely wrong.
I am not saying Page Rank is best, only that it is sound in that it brings you to the pages most people have visited if they followed links. Which is a good representation of data on the internet.
I often find myself looking for things which are not of interest to the bulk of people on the internet and the page rank system works against finding that one page in a million that everybody else does not know about.
