Will Google Give Us Control Of PageRank?
By Kurt Steinbrueck
July 21, 2011 
4 Comments
PageRank is the magical stuff that flows from page to page bestowing high rankings on some and exiling others. Control of PageRank has been long sought, if never achieved. PageRank is so important to some that they are willing to spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours sculpting the links on their websites in an effort to improve the rankings of some of the page. This is known as PageRank sculpting.
PageRank Sculpting:
For a while now, Google has told webmasters not to bother PageRank sculpting, but could they be changing their tune soon? Bill Slawski reports in SEO by the Sea that a patent has been granted to Google which, if implemented, would allow webmasters to include additional tags in links giving more information to the search bots about the link. Could one such tag possibly allow webmasters to tell Google how much PageRank to pass?
Evidence?
Part of the summary of the patent reads:
“The selected method of processing content may include blocking processing of the content associated with the first link tag. The selected method of processing content may include adjusting a weight associated with the first link tag.
In some embodiments, the method of processing documents may include computing one or more document ranking values for the one or more document locations. The computing may be performed in accordance with the weight associated with the first link tag. In some embodiments, the link tag may be associated with the one or more content locations and the method of processing documents may include computing the one or more document ranking values for the one or more content locations in accordance with the weight associated with the first link tag.”
This seems to be referring to a variable related to the weight of the link, PageRank. As Bill mentions in his article, this could look something like: “linkweight=0.5″. How nice would it be if Google were to actually allow webmasters to tell them how much of their pages’ PR they wanted to pass to each link?
Is it just a pipe-dream?
The reality is that Google files for scores of patents every year. Some of these patents end up being used in their search algorithm or other Google products, but many are never used, at least not that we are aware of. This patent was apparently filed in 2005. I’m sure Google’s thoughts on links and link tags has changed in the past 6 year, but who knows. Maybe they were just waiting for the patent to be approved to start testing some new link tags. We’ll have to watch and see.
What do you think?
Do you think there’s any way Google would give people a way to determine how much PR a link gives?
I highly doubt that. Seems like to much room for abuse. I'm surprised they would even file a patent for that. But perhaps those kind of tags could be used for another purpose, which they may have been thinking of.
I'm doubtful they would give us the power, too, seeing that it's more in line with Google's M.O. But I'm curious how you think a link-weight type tag would be abused.
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