

Ask HN: Page Rank Suggestions - paul9290

I see from a recent post Google has made adjustment to their page rank.  Also we saw a slight adjustment with our rank.<p>Was wondering what are the factors that affect page rank?  Also, the experiences of fellow hackers that caused your page rank to increase and decrease.
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mdasen
The basic factor is how important your site is. Important sites get higher
PageRanks.

I know that's not the answer you wanted, but it's the truth. Lots of people
have schemes. They might work for a little while, but Google figures them out
and often punishes participants.

The best information can be found here:
[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769)

In basic: Links to you from _reputable_ sources help you. Having your pages
have good content for users helps you. Doing anything to manipulate Google
will hurt you eventually. Hiding things (like with CSS), trying to load up on
keywords, duplicating content, and other sneaky things hurt you. Hiding
content behind a registration or other thing a search engine can't do hurts
you. Being browsable with a text browser helps you.

Google's software is advanced. If you put something in an H1, it will realize
that it's important to your page. However, if you then resize it to 10px, it's
likely to pick up that you're using H1s inappropriately as the Googlebot now
grabs CSS as well.

And PageRank often isn't as important as other factors. For example, let's say
you want users to find your site when they search for "blog". If people are
linking to you with the line "There are cool accounts at [site name]!", that's
not going to count much to the keyword "blog". However, if people are linking
to you with "Get a [free blog] over at site name!" it'll help a lot more. The
fact is that one doesn't care about PageRank so much as one cares about where
they get placed in results for certain keywords.

Most of it is just common sense. If your site has compelling content, it will
be seen positively. If it doesn't, it won't. It becomes harder and harder
every day to fool Google. I suggest not trying. Best case, it boosts you for a
short while. Worst case, you get delisted.

------
Anon84

          The basic factor is how important your site is. Important sites get higher PageRanks.
    

Well... that's somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy. Sites that get high PR
show up first in search results, which helps them get more traffic, becoming
more well known, hence becoming "important".

PR solves for your score (self consistently) by basically averaging out all
the scores of everybody linking to you while coupling this with a (rather
crude) model of user behavior. Of course, this is how it's described in the
original paper and definitely very far from what actually goes on under the
hood now a days.

It should also be noticed that several improvements on/replacements for PR
have been suggested over the years, with:

TrustRank <http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF>

BrowseRank [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/people/tyliu/fp032-liu.p...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/people/tyliu/fp032-liu.pdf)

HITS <http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/auth.pdf>

being the better known ones. Alternatives usually revolve around improving the
user behavior model (like including real traffic data in the calculation
<http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/fil/Papers/click.pdf> ), but there is
still a lot of work to be done in this field (there's couple of interesting
papers coming out in WSDM09 and WWW09 about this).

------
jmtame
There's no easy way to improve it. It's logarithmic, so each jump you make is
substantially more difficult than the previous. They tweak it sometimes when
they find out how people are gaming it, so every time you try to find some
"trick" they're going to fix it. I spoke with one of the engineers who works
on the core algorithms and page rank team, and they tweak that stuff sometimes
hundreds of times a day. They're extremely diligent, so you won't figure out a
way to easily increase your page rank.

The best way is to get highly credible sites to cover you. Time is taken into
account (how long your domain has been up), the amount of content on your web
site, how relevant your content is to a search query at the time, the amount
of traffic you receive, amongst several other things that are more minuscule.
You're best hope is to just do whatever you do really well so that it inspires
people to talk about you.

~~~
paul9290
Has anyone used website.grader.com? If so did you find it helpful?

~~~
redorb
thought that was a scam from a marketng depertment

~~~
paul9290
It's a service from HubSpot.com - owner is publisher of onstartups.com. Random
posts from said blog appear on HN frontpage.

~~~
dshah
Indeed, some of my OnStartups.com posts do show up on the HN front page.
Hopefully, it's not completely random and some people do find the articles
useful.

~~~
paul9290
Random was not meant derogatorily.

------
siong1987
Google Official Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide:
[http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-
optimiza...](http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-
starter-guide.pdf)

Note: Link to PDF

------
tk999
Here is a case study about how big company like 1800flower boost the page
ranking.

[http://blog.ask2link.com/case-study-advertisers-get-great-
re...](http://blog.ask2link.com/case-study-advertisers-get-great-results-with-
ask2link-text-links)

------
FiReaNG3L
More links point to your site than your site points out to others, basically.
Quality of links is taken into account, of course, so permanent front page of
a high pagerank could boost yours quite a bit.

