Last updated on December 22nd, 2015
Welcome to SEO Advantage’s Trivia feature, where we discuss, dissect and comment on the internet and marketing, and how the two intertwine.
Why was PageRank originally developed?
- As a research project
- As a Google penalty
- As a link organization tool
Google uses an algorithm to keep track of the traffic that websites receive; as well as their importance, called PageRank. According to Google, PageRank counts certain aspects of a webpage (how many links they contain and the perceived quality of the links included) and uses this to estimate their importance.
This is important to know because it’s assumed that websites that are more important are able to gain more links.
Google also states that before PageRank was developed, websites deemed more important were assumed due to the density of links they had. This system did not work because people could easily manipulate the count by repeating words to gain a higher rank.
According to Computimes, PageRank was developed in 1996 at Stanford University by Larry Page (who PageRank was named after and a founder of Google) and Sergey Brin. They developed it while working on a research project to develop new types of search engines. A Graz University page-study concluded that PageRank was the brainchild of Sergey Brin who felt it was possible to order website information in a “hierarchy by link popularity”.
Although PageRank is not Google’s only algorithm, it was the first and the most well-known. Moreover, PageRank continues to be an essential part of Google’s process to create better and more productive web searches.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank