Indeed. Simple link counting based search algorithms got gamed a lot in the past, by regular website operators and most heavily by spammers. That's partially wh

Indeed. Simple link counting based search algorithms got gamed a lot in the past, by regular website operators and most heavily by spammers. That's partially why the current search algorithms are much more clever and secret than just using the Page rank. Human raters and machine learning off the data they generate are used as well. This helps to make the rules more uncertain and nasty SEO tricks much harder to discover and use. Compare this to the situation in rating of academic research, where the papers are rated by the community of authors itself and the ranking is essentially a weighted counting of references. Of course it leads to lots of self-serving spam. If the idea of independent raters (and possibly machine learning on top of it) could be implemented for academic papers as well, that would be a big improvement, I think. Academia has got a lot to learn from search engines.