Blog comments for PageRank - is Google really that stupid?

Posted by stuart as , , ,

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

“Shit! PR updates coming, gotta spend six hours a day leaving comments of questionable value on blogs (better make sure they’re not using “nofollow”) for the next couple of weeks.” 

Do we really think Google’s that stupid?

We live in a perpetual state of fear that we’ll piss off Google in some way, as they hold a hand full of aces as far as most of us are concerned in our endeavours to turn a buck:

1. They own the search engine which sends us most of our traffic
2. They own the advertising network which provides (most of) us with the largest slice of our income

We have no doubts in our belief that Google will detect invalid clicks on our AdSense ads, we believe implicitly that Google will penalise us for duplicate content, and we’re even scared to make a mistake in our layout, robots.txt, or even who we link to from our blogs.

Yet we persist with this fantasy that Google’s not smart enough to work out that those little bits at the bottom of blog posts with links where the names are have been left by the person who’s blog they point to?

By the above definition of pagerank, a link is considered by Google to be a “vote” for the site it points to. For Google to allow people to vote for themselves would be just plain stupid.

So even if Google’s allowing these links to count for something now, you’d better believe that the day is coming where blog comments will be devalued as a source of pagerank.