11. PR0 - Google's PageRank 0 Penalty (continued)

A Critical View on
BadRank and PR0

How Google would realize the combination of PageRank and BadRank is of rather minor importance. Indeed, a separate computation and a subsequent combination of both has the consequence that it may not be possible to see the actual effect of a high

BadRank by looking at the Toolbar. If a page has a high PageRank in the original sense, the influence of its BadRank can be negligible. But if another page links to it, this could have quite serious consequences.

An even bigger problem is the direct reversion of the PageRank algorithm as we have presented it here: Just as an additional inbound for one page can do nothing but increasing this page's PageRank, an additional outbound link can only increase its BadRank. This is because of the addition of BadRank values in the BadRank formula. So, it does not matter how many "good" outbound links a page has - one link to a spam page can be enough to lead to a PR0.

Indeed, this problem may appear in exceptional cases only. By our direct reversion of the PageRank algorithm, the BadRank of a page is divided by its inbound links and single links to pages with high BadRank transfer only a part of that BadRank in each case. Google's Matt Cutts' remark on this issue is: "If someone accidentally does a link to a bad site, that may not hurt them, but if they do twenty, that's a problem." (searchenginewatch.com/sereport/02/11-searchking.html)

However, as long as all links are weighted uniformly within the BadRank computation, there is another problem. If two pages differ widely in PageRank and both have a link to the same page with a high BadRank, this may lead to the page with the higher PageRank suffering far less from the transferred BadRank than the page with the low PageRank. We have to hope that Google knows how to deal with such problems. Nevertheless it shall be noted that, regarding the procedure presented here, outbound links can do nothing but harm.

Of course, all statements regarding how PR0 works are pure speculation. But in principle, the analysis of link structures similarly to the PageRank technique should be the way how only Google understands to deal with spam.

This article reproduced with permission of eFactory.
© 2002 eFactory Internet-Agentur KG Online-Marketing - written by Markus Sobek
PageRank and Google are trademarks of Google Inc., Mountain ViewCA, USA.
PageRank is protected by US Patent 6,285,999.