Comments on: Project BackRub a.k.a. Google

By: Top 10 Tools & Techniques for Recruiting » 2009 » December » 05

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 16:57:25 +0000

[...] fact, when Google’s predecessor started out as Larry Page’s “BackRub” < http://www.smartmoneydaily.com/business/project-backrub-aka-google.aspx> in the 1990s, finding backlinks was its only aim! However, not all backlinks are shown in [...]

By: Google me this… « The Ministry of Charles

Google me this… « The Ministry of Charles — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 23:28:14 +0000

[...] as Google. There wasn’t a multimillion-dollar research lab funding their unfortunately named “BackRub” project in their Stanford dorms. Similarly, Web 2.0’s beauty, and enigma, is exemplified in [...]

By: Nikki

Nikki — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 04:51:42 +0000

True. When talking to the Google engineers at the Webmaster World conference they emphasized over and over again that you cannot lose rank by linking to someone else, but you gain rank from the number of inboud links. Of course, this is contradictory to the confirmed notion the inbound links are somehow tempered by outbound links. Basically they were saying don’t be afraid to give because in doing so you will receive. Interesting how they used that time tested Truth.

By: Eric Hamil

Eric Hamil — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 04:51:23 +0000

“Worth a read for any Google searcher, but if you’re a web entrepreneur using Adsense or Adwords and worrying about page rank, it is essential.” While the article is historically interesting, and a good introduction to the basic concept of PageRank, it doesn’t really give you enough information to effectively act on. For that, you need a better understanding of the scale and economy of PageRank. I used the idealized formula and a spreadsheet to get answers to a couple questions that I encounter frequently in my line of work (web marketing). How Many Links Does it Take to Reach PRx? Because link quality is a major factor along with link quantity, there’s no single answer. A single PR7 link can give you PR5, while it would take somewhere in the neighborhood of 17,000 PR1 links to accomplish the same feat. As a general rule, if you want to move up one rank on the toolbar (a discrete display of continuous data), you need 3-4 links from R+1 sites, where R is the rank of your page, OR 1 link from an R+2 site, OR 18 – 19 links from sites with the same rank. How Do Outbound Links Effect PR Passing? One fact that wasn’t mentioned at all in the article is that a page doesn’t pass its full rank to every page it links to. Actually, it passes a portion of its rank (85%, according to a really outdated published formula) divided by the number of links on a page — that prevents pagerank from feeding back… So the common question is, just how many links is too many? The short answer is that the number and quality of inbound links is a much larger factor than the number of links on the page in determining how much PR is passed to the pages you link to. For example, a PR7 page with 90 outbound links passes about eighteen times as much PR as a PR4 page with only 1 outbound link.