| Thanks for the response. > My story is about what happened when Google revealed PageRank scores for pages across the web. And I'd assert that people already knew if they were number one in the search results, or not. And that metric continues to be the main thing they pay attention to. Well, that and their traffic numbers from Google. My point being, we all knew Google was using links to rank, and the search result rank was visible just by doing a search on a few of your synonyms and adjacent terms, market, brands, trademarks, etc. The battle over spamming links was inevitible, whether they revealed PageRank numbers or not. > I'm sure we'd have had some of this even without PageRank scores ever having been revealed. Perhaps it would have been as much, even. After all, it was well-known that Google was leveraging links as part of its ranking algorithm. The market would have been there. But I do think that releasing the PageRank scores accelerated market faster than it would have done otherwise. I can agree with that, but that's not the tone that I get from your article, at all. The tone I get is that Google created this monster, visible PageRank score, and those crappy emails, link drops, and need to use nofollow, are uniquely Google's fault, and it all could have been prevented if they hadn't ruined the web in 2000 by making it visible. > Google initially thought it was immune. Your quote from Sergey doesn't imply to me that he thought they were immune. It tells me that they mechanism they intended to use to fight spam would be to reduce its rank so low that "...they may almost never appear on the search results page..." You may think that's a pedantic difference, but I see it as a meaningful difference. You can't claim that we're all immune to measles, mumps, polio... But we've reduced the incidence to an incredibly low level, here in the Western world. |