Pagerank is Dead? Good Riddance!

Hey! Enki has moved his blog to Armyofevilrobots.com. Check it out after you are done here. This page is going nowhere though...

Looks like pagerank is finally going the way of the dodo. No big surprise there, since it has been easy to take advantage of for a long time. It is no secret that deliberately cross linking can increase your rank, but there is now a lot of conjecture as to how Google knows which pages to cull. Here is an idea on how they are doing it.

I am guessing that blogs have a unique and easily detected text string that makes the job a no brainer.

Hint: It's the trackbacks stupid.

Maybe. From Google's of view it is an obvious string to search for that indicates that a site is trying to artificially (remember... from Google's point of view) inflate it's importance.

This is probably even a fair assessment, since pagerank hinges more on the effects of links added by a human (^ie:Less efficient information aggregator) rather than an automated source. Most bloggers, myself included, don't exclude their pages via robots.txt, so this stuffs Google chock full of automated entries.

Google's weighting system (which is honestly a paleolithic piece of software, even if it is still pretty effective), wasn't designed to take this into account, so they have to tweak it somehow so that it DOES take it into account. Ergo: the easiest way to do so is to downgrade the pagerank of sites that contain something like:

<xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">

That's how I would do it anyways.