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How to game Google’s rankings with PageRank

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 15, 2007 in SEO Theory

As many of you know, Matt Cutts recently updated his April 14, 2007 post titled “How to report paid links” with an extensive list of dos and don’ts to help Webmasters understand Google’s position on paid links of all types.

The bottom line is that Google is only interested in devaluing links that are provided or acquired for the purpose of “gaming” Google’s rankings with PageRank.

This post is one of those occasions where Matt could almost — but not quite — be accused of deceiving the general public. He’s sneaky when he wants to be, and of course he cannot fully disclose everything so his sneakiness is just part of the job. Having once been in a similar position myself, I well understand the fine line Matt has to walk.

Google’s search results are not determined by PageRank. Neither Internal PageRank nor the worthless numbers they stuff into the Toolbar PR help your search results rankings. Some SEOs understand that. Most don’t have a clue when it comes to PageRank.

PageRank is added to Google’s relevance score. It’s virtually impossible for any pages to achieve high rankings on the basis of PageRank alone. After all, if all you have going for you is PageRank, then your relevance score is 0. And that is why Yahoo! does not rank first for keywords like “elephant”, “dog”, and “buy movie tickets” (even though Yahoo! is actually relevant to the query).

Without that almighty relevance score, your PageRank doesn’t mean squat. It gets you nothing useful. PageRank is as worthless as the paper it is printed on.

So what is really at stake here? Why is Google so concerned about PageRank if PageRank doesn’t determine search results? I can only guess at what their priorities might be. I won’t make any such guesses here (and probably not elsewhere).

But I can point out what PageRank gets you. In PageRank: Where it helps, where it doesn’t help, and other facts I quoted Google and Google representatives (including Matt Cutts) on three points that essentially remain the same:

1. PageRank gets you crawled
2. PageRank influences which Google Directory listings are shown first
3. PageRank is combined with about 100 (or more) other factors to determine your position in the Web search results.

Even Danny Sullivan’s well-written recap of PageRank doesn’t tell you anything more useful than that.

We can actualy refine what we know about PageRank a little better. I’m pretty sure now — after many months of studying Google’s search results (through extensive research I’m not allowed to publish), reading comments by Matt Cutts, Adam Lasnik, and Vanessa Fox (which pretty much confirm the extensive research I’m not allowed to publish), and evuating all the outdated or outlandish ideas that I have found on various popular SEO blogs and forums — that PageRank determines who goes (or stays) in the Main Web Index and who gets stuck in the Supplemental Results Index.

Matt even confirmed as much recently on SEOmoz (although he added the disclaimer that he does not work on the Supplemental Results team, so we have to be careful how much weight we give to his explanations).

You need PageRank to get into and stay in the Main Web Index. Now, in the past having pages only in the Supplemental Results Index didn’t really matter. Many of us used to see those pages come up in search results. For a long time I told people not to panic. But then along came Bigdaddy and by September 2006 SE Roundtable was reporting that Google’s cache for supplemental results does not highlight query words.

Since then we have learned that you cannot get Google to return a Supplemental Results page for a query — even if the query is for text found only on that page — unless there are links pointing to the page that contain one or more of the query terms.

That’s a problem. That’s a big problem for a lot of people.

In effect, Google has stated that it will only return results from Web pages (not sites) that Google trusts, and Google apparently doesn’t trust all that many pages. While I am in no position to know how many pages are in the Main Web Index, my estimates by several different measures indicate that up to 80% of all of Google’s indexed pages appear only in the Supplemental Results Index.

That’s a problem. That’s a big problem for searchers and Webmasters alike. You’d think Google would want to improve the quality of its search results but quality doesn’t appear to be their priority. Now, as Danny Sullivan pointed out, a U.S. court stipulated some time back that PageRank is only Google’s opinion and that Google has a right to express its opinion through PageRank.

All well and good, but how well do you want to trust an opinion that is based largely on ignorance — algorithmic ignorance that doesn’t even look at the contents of possibly as many as 80% of all pages that are supposedly crawled and indexed?

The average searcher doesn’t know any of this, but Google’s search results speak for themselves. And as industry metric after industry metric indicates that the number of queries performed on Google each month increases at a faster rate than for other search services, we should be asking ourselves: how many queries do we have to perform on Google before we find something useful?

I can tell you I often revise queries on Google before actually clicking on any results. Do I do that for other search services too? Absolutely. I just happen to find myself doing it on Google more than other search services.

So if I’m experiencing that kind of low quality in Google search results, am I alone or are other people having to go to greater lengths to find what they want? It’s a question worth asking, although there is probably no way to know for sure what is happening. In time, if Google’s quality has really slipped then the gains it has made in terms of actual monthly visitors (and visits) should start to slip.

Which is a bit of a digression. By now you must be wanting to know what I have to say about how to game Google’s search results with bought PageRank. Can you actually do it? Truth be told, yes. You can pay for PageRank without having to worry about whether Google will strip your inbound links of their ability to pass value.

But do you understand why you should be buying that PageRank? Have you figured out yet that it won’t help your rankings, except in that it will get your pages into the Main Web Index. If you cannot rank from the Supplemental Results Index (except for only very obscure queries), then being in the Main Web Index is of paramount importance.

Hence, we do indeed have a real incentive to buy PageRank. And if you have a large Web site you need to buy as much PageRank as you can.

But where can you buy PageRank without fear of tripping over Google’s guidelines? Okay, let’s get to the obvious answer: directories. But not just any directories.

Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.

Do you know what directory optimization is? Have you ever had to do it? It’s a royal pain and I can tell you I was happy the day I realized I no longer had to optimize for directories.

Directories don’t like affiliate pages, so you had to create a lot of natural, informative content and stuff your affiliate pages deeper inside your site to get the directories to approve your submission.

Directories don’t spider your pages (except to see that your URL actually returns something resembling what you say it should return). So you’re stuck earning relevance points on the basis of your listing title, listing description, page URL, and directory category. You would be amazed at how many people blew two of those factors before the directory editors began mangling their carefully spammed titles and descriptions.

People no longer look to directories for information. But there was a time when the search engines were weird tools that people didn’t really trust. You never knew what would show up in your browser by clicking on search engine listings. Directories were safe because they were human-vetted sources of information about the Web.

When Inktomi was the king of the search engines directory listings didn’t really help you much with search engine rankings. At most you got a link to help boost your link popularity, but raw link popularity was more easily manipulated through reciprocal crawl pages. You’d run over to search engine A, find all your backlinks, put them on a page on your site, and then submit that page to search engine B. BOOM! Instant link popularity. And the links helped because search engine B “found them on its own”.

But then Google came along with its novel approach to link valuation: PageRank. In the old days some of us noticed that certain sites were crawled more frequently, updated in Google’s results more frequently, and often dominated Google’s results more often than other sites (except Amazon, which for almost a year dominated most of Google’s commercial search results).

News sites and directories did pretty good in Google because they had strong internal linkage, strong on-page relevance, and were frequently crawled by Googlebot. A few of us noticed that these pages often had high Toolbar PR values (when the Toolbar was first introduced). So we concluded that maybe getting links from the directories and news sites might help us get new content into Google’s index.

Ranking on Google was always easiest through on-page factors. But somewhere along the way as people caught on to link bombing the erroneous notion that rankings were controlled through links developed. SEOs crippled themselves for about 3-5 years. Technically, most SEOs are still living in the dark ages because they don’t understand that it’s not exactly the links that are helping.

It’s the anchor text. It was always the anchor text. Google has always allowed links to pass anchor text. In the old days any link could pass anchor text. Now most links probably don’t pass anything. But instead of chasing anchor text most SEOs still chase PageRank.

Ironicallly, though you can easily manipulate Google through link anchor text, it’s now the PageRank that is more important because without the PageRank you don’t get into the Main Web Index.

So here we are again in a position where it looks like directories may be the route of salvation for many. But there is one problem: every SEO on the planet is looking for as many directories as possible for their “link building”. And naturally every spammer is building faux directories in the hope of getting people to link to their sites so they can make money off of AdSense and Yahoo! ads.

And all the old, good directories are pretty much dead. Whose directory will let anyone in these days? How much does it cost? What does it take to be accepted?

There are so-called “niche” directories, of course, but they don’t pack the PageRank of a Yahoo!, DMOZ, or Wikipedia (which does act as a directory). And Wikipedia has nofollowed most of its outbound links anyway. So that leaves you “niche wikis”, if you can find any that will let your links stand.

Forums can also act like directories but any good forum’s moderators are deleting spam links on site.

And that just complicates the problem because there are still plenty of so-called SEOs who spam the forums and blogs with links to their porn and affiliate sites.

So you’re pretty much stuck with buying PageRank from a handful of directories that may indeed pass value without risk of penalty. You may very well see an increase in directory submission fees. Demand will drive the price up. Some directories may add staff to handle the increase in submissions. Some directories will just pocket their windfall profits.

But which directories will still pass value? Who wants to spend their days editing directories? Who wants to build another niche directory that will actually be worthwhile and usable?

Googlers may feel like they have defined the problem pretty well but history shows us that Googlers tend to be very slow on the uptake. They never understood how and why people link on the Web, so they appear not to understand that the wheels have already been set into motion. Necessity will give birth to innovation. We’re already seeing the first attempts at innovation, and I don’t mean the various link selling schemes that Matt Cutts occasionally refers to on his site.

Nor do I mean the paid “review” services, either. Nor do I mean social media sites (which can only help a small percentage of Webmasters).

The innovation that has begun to emerge is part of what may serve as the foundation for the “3rdGen Web”. There are new ways to organize and present information about Web sites. Eventually some of those new ways will gather momentum and the sites that participate in those innovative services will reap benefits — including PageRank.

But remember the most important lesson: you only need PageRank to validate — to be accepted into the Main Web Index. Once you have enough PageRank to keep your pages out of the Supplemental Results Index, you should be good. It won’t really matter where you got that PageRank from, or whether you paid for it. As long as you don’t violate Google’s guidelines, they have no reason to complain.

Of course, PageRank was never and indication of or assurance of quality. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.