Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Thoughts on Google PageRank and relevancy.

Firstly, pagerank is a great algorithm, when applied to a web not influenced by pagerank.

The problems however lie in how pagerank and relevancy ranking influence the Internet and its own input. Let's use my game The Polynomial as example. At the moment, the top result for "polynomial demo" is gamespot page about my game. These guys do not link to my website at all.
In result, some people whom searched for 'polynomial demo' do themselves link to gamespot instead of my pages even though they would prefer to link original author. That is turning high pagerank into form of self-fulfilling prophecy. It could well be how gamespot managed to get high pagerank and relevancy in first place. I cannot compete. I cannot pay for ad links to artificially inflate search engine ranks - and even if I could, I would not. I do not have time to bother reorganizing links on my website as to focus pagerank on a single page. Neither can most independent developers.
I do not mind gamespot much. They have nice user opinions about my game, and my game contains "get full version" button that is opening my page. I only wish they would play fair and link to original author, or not require registration for download.

In retrospect, I should have created a lot of well-interlinked pages covering all the expected keywords, but well. I'll try to think up something for the final release, as well as write an article about it if I have time.

3 comments:

  1. You're right, but you're also wrong.

    In my experience, good content beats keywords and internet hacks hands down.

    So, just keep doing what you're doing and the rest will come alone.

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  2. Well that's what I thought, but I think now that some attention has to be paid to that kind of stuff... specially that I need some sales now to keep afloat.
    I'm testing if new page titles will work. It's really weird to be 4th site for such word as 'polynomial' but not even be on first page for 'polynomial demo' or 'polynomial download'.

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  3. Google has one again updated their search engine algorithm and pagerank on November 2009. This has caused great joy for many webmasters, while others are scrambling to find out what happened to their websites pagerank

    ReplyDelete