[thelist] Google Pagerank & Validation

martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com
Fri Oct 19 04:02:21 CDT 2001


Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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Hi Angie

Businesses already have something to gain from being standards-based
and accessible: More people who can use their site. In the UK, 10% of the
population is registered as disabled.

Also in the UK, being accessible has the advantage of removing a site
addressing consumers from liability to unlimited fines under the Disability
Discrimination Act 1995 (Part III).

Changing the Google Ranking to include validation (while clearly A Good
Thing) isn't really the point for a search engine - an SE's job is to find
the
most relevant content for the user's query.

Although being accessible (coding sites in structural/semantic HTML with
<h#> tags and alt attributes to images) *will* help your ranking as it
helps
the SE's parser work out what your content's about.

All Flash content doesn't really appear in the rankings.

Cheers
Martin

btw, the Google ranking methodology is publically available:
http://www7.scu.edu.au/programme/fullpapers/1921/com1921.htm
although it has been slightly tinkered since then. The basic algorithm
for PageRanking is:

We assume page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We
usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The
PageRank of a page A is given as follows:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages' PageRanks will be one.





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Subject:  Re: [thelist] Google Pagerank & Validation


That is just a brilliant idea.

If businesses had something to gain (other than a great site of
course) from getting people who know what they're doing then I'm sure
they would.

I'm going to find out who runs google. I'm sure I have the docs from
their bete years ago somewhere.

>Two things:
>
>1. Would it be a good idea to incorporate some sort of W3 validation
>checker into Google's (or any other search engine's) pagerank scheme? My
>idea is that pages that have fewer or no accessibility/w3 validation
>errors would get a slightly higher pagerank. How would this affect the
>quality of the results? As soon as word got out that validated web pages
>score higher in Google, you can sure bet that web programmers around the
>world will be scrambling to get their pages up to snuff...
>
>2. Is it technically possible?


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