Forum Moderators: open
DATE RANK
Everything from blogs to the size of the web has been accused of making Google's results irrelevant. These things may attribute to this problem but there is another factor that contributes more than any of these things. The date that a link is published is often more important than where it is published. This has become apparent because Altavista (a search engine that most searchers do not like) holds the #1 rank in Google for the term search engine. This happens because your PR is based on the people who link to you. The major search engines of today (Alltheweb, Google,Teoma) were not created when most of the links for Altavista were published. This makes them irrelevant for voting purposes because the publishers were not able to consider all of the choices that are available today. This type of ranking would be hard to implement and would also increase the time needed to calculate PR. The benefits of Date Rank would greatly outweigh the troubles mentioned above. We can only hope search engines start to use new methods like Date Rank instead of useless things like removing blogs.
as discussed in this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]
Link-based methods have the problem that relatively new pages have usually fewer hyperlinks pointing to them than older pages, which tends to give a lower score to newer pages.
from the google patent listed in this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]
and:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
Also, practical problems arise: which link is considered as new and which not. (For example, a link could be considered as new if it's added or if the content of the page was changed.)
Of course, there are areas where freshness plays a role (SARS). However, there are also areas which haven't changed in the last ten years (physics e-print archive).
If someone published, say, a guide to the 'new HTML markup' language way back when, and it is still considered the best reference, why should links to it be degraded?
The guide was written, is considered good, so why should the author update it?
Sorry nirelan, but the logic doesn't hold for me.
Cy
I agree with your final comment. I think the notion that Blogs are making life difficult for search engines is just a fabrication peddled by the tech. media, who, as usual, haven't got a clue what they are talking about.
On the contrary, a Blog actually contributes significantly to the factors that make Page Rank such a good indicator of page "quality".
Blogs link to lots of pages, and by their nature, being the ramblings of their authors, incorporate those links into the body text of their content. This means that relevant keywords appropriate to the target are included within the anchor text - a fundamental of the way Google calculates Page Rank. My experience is that Blogs don't link to other blogs so much as they link to content on the web - so if you get a lot of blogs all linking to a particular place it will account for yet another factor that goes into Page Rank.
It could also help in promoting newer pages against the link advantage of more established sites. Go blogs.
