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I'm not convinced Google has stopped using backlinks and other classic pagerank attributes for search ranking.

by geenat 2y ago

stanislavb 2y ago
I think you are right. They might be using a plethora of other factor as an addition to back links; however, genuine links from authoritative sources still seem to be the best "voting" mechanism to bubble up good content/results. I can imagine that Reddit could join the search war - first, they have so much user gen content that people are deliberately looking for; second, they could use the voting mechanisms that are already in place to give preference to the "better" content. Of course, I might be wrong :).
- cryptoz 2y ago
  The part where you might be wrong is the part where Reddit does it. IIRC they have been “working really hard on a better search” for Reddit for…15 years? Every couple years spez will pop up and claim they almost have it! I wouldn’t hold my breath.
28304283409234 2y ago
Nobody said they stopped. The article argues that the practise has become infinitely less effective, and Google is optimizing for their customers as opposed to their users.
captainmuon 2y ago
For many queries, it seems the top result is just Stackoverflow, Wikipedia or something simliar, then a couple of organic links, and then just junk. And on the second or third page, the results just stop. I have a feeling that at this point, it is a mixture of white- and blacklisting, and single-page classifiers based on heuristics or "AI". PageRank is surely in there, but probably not dominant. (Sidenote: I wonder if they secretly do ignore rel="nofollow" because so many links use it.) Funnily, I've used PageRank for some smaller search projects, and it still works very well if you use it in a vertical, say "educational resources" or "programming" or simliar. I just did a broad crawl, 3-4 steps from some known "good" seed URLs away, calculate PageRank and mix it in with Solr's classifiers.

I'm not convinced Google has stopped using backlinks and other classic pagerank attributes for search ranking.

by geenat 2y ago

I'm not convinced Google has stopped using backlinks and other classic pagerank attributes for search ranking.

I think you are right. They might be using a plethora of other factor as an addition to back links; however, genuine links from authoritative sources still seem to be the best "voting" mechanism to bubble up good content/results. I can imagine that Reddit could join the search war - first, they have so much user gen content that people are deliberately looking for; second, they could use the voting mechanisms that are already in place to give preference to the "better" content. Of course, I might be wrong :).

cryptoz 2y ago
The part where you might be wrong is the part where Reddit does it. IIRC they have been “working really hard on a better search” for Reddit for…15 years? Every couple years spez will pop up and claim they almost have it! I wouldn’t hold my breath.

28304283409234 2y ago

Nobody said they stopped. The article argues that the practise has become infinitely less effective, and Google is optimizing for their customers as opposed to their users.

captainmuon 2y ago

For many queries, it seems the top result is just Stackoverflow, Wikipedia or something simliar, then a couple of organic links, and then just junk. And on the second or third page, the results just stop. I have a feeling that at this point, it is a mixture of white- and blacklisting, and single-page classifiers based on heuristics or "AI". PageRank is surely in there, but probably not dominant. (Sidenote: I wonder if they secretly do ignore rel="nofollow" because so many links use it.) Funnily, I've used PageRank for some smaller search projects, and it still works very well if you use it in a vertical, say "educational resources" or "programming" or simliar. I just did a broad crawl, 3-4 steps from some known "good" seed URLs away, calculate PageRank and mix it in with Solr's classifiers.