- 3 minutes read #pagerank

Questions and Answers

This is a FAQ on my paper on Google Pagerank.

Contents

When was your paper written, I need to know if it is still relevant?

Well, it was originally written around May 2002. But the thing about mathematics is: once is true it’s always true – maths doesn’t change over time…

Only mathematics is certain

Google may change the amount that pagerank influences the final choice and ordering of results – but the algorithm called “pagerank”, and my analysis of it, won’t change ever.

The lowest absolute pagerank a page can have is 0.15 due to the “(1 - d)” part of the equation. But this is likely to show up as 0 on the Google browser toolbar tool.

Your site is likely to be de-indexed if it has no links inbound though – I do remember reading that the Pagerank engine does do an optimisation before it calculates the PRs in that it removes pages from the database that have no links to them.

This is quite reasonable given the original motivation of pagerank:

PageRank can be thought of as a model of user behavior. We assume there is a “random surfer” who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting “back” but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page.

If a site or page has no inbound links then the “random surfer” can never get there. (well, ok, unless the “random surfer” starts out inside your site of course…)

But it’s quite hard to have absolutely no inbound links. It only takes just one public link for your site to be “on” the web. DMOZ is a good place to put your one link if there’s absolutely no other avenue open to you (though this is very unlikely)

Can I reproduce your article on my website. I will of course give you 100% credit

No you cannot!

I’m very happy for people to produce translations of the paper, reproduce it in books, use it as an educational aid in a class or reproduce parts of it for comment – basically anything that adds value – as long as:

  1. you give the full URL to my original as a reference – http://ianrogers.uk/google-page-rank/
  2. let me know so I can add a link to the translations page.

But, no, of course you can’t just copy it verbatim into your own site…

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