Fiddling With Google's Rankings
26 September 2007
I have several web sites. One thing that most web masters try to achieve is a high placing in Google's search results. While earlier versions of search engines relied solely on the number of times a word appeared on a web page, search engines are now more advanced. And as the search engines have become more advanced, web masters have tried to find ways to manipulate the search engines.
Perhaps the most well known technique for deciding the Google search engine results is that of Pagerank. Pagerank looks at the number of links pointing to each web page, and takes that to be an indication of how popular a page is. However, many web masters, being human, are open to bribery, and will sell links from their web sites to your web sites for money. As a result, those web masters who want to build up their Pagerank and get higher search engine results just have to reach for their credit card and some buying.
Is this ethical? On the one hand, many web surfers expect Google to provide an unbiased opinion on what the most relevant web sites are. On the other hand, this can be seen as another form of advertising - people should be able to buy links to their web sites (and get a higher placing in the Google results) in much the same way that they purchase radio and TV advertising. However, this means that the higher rankings will be largely devoted to the larger businesses who can afford to purchase the links.
I tend to agree that people should be able to manipulate the rankings of they want to. We live in a free world, so as long as we obey the law, we should be able to do as we please.