Re: Why the rash of people bypassing setup.exe to install?

["Peter A. Castro" <doctor at fruitbat dot org>]

On 16 Feb 2003, Robert Collins wrote:

> On Sun, 2003-02-16 at 11:48, Peter A. Castro wrote:
> > On 16 Feb 2003, Robert Collins wrote:
> > 
> > > On Sun, 2003-02-16 at 10:41, Peter A. Castro wrote:
> > > > Where, exactly, did you read this (a link to some doc would be
> > > > enightening)?  I see nothing about this in Googles documentation of Page
> > > > Ranking.  And, google isn't the only search engine out there.  I'd think
> > > > you'd want to try and get as much exposure as possible in as many engines
> > > > as possible. 
> > > 
> > > An interview on slashdot some time back.
> > And you believe everything you read on slashdot ?-)
> 
> It was from the google director of technology.
> http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/03/1352239&mode=thread
> 
> BUT: it doesn't have the comment I recalled. Ermm, oops.

Oops, indeed :)  Thanks for the article, though.  I might continue my own
research as a side hobby.

> > Seriously, I can't seem to find this interview.  I've been reading
> > several articles on google lately (like the paper "The PageRank Citation
> > Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web (1998)").  I've been searching
> > articles on google, itself, as well as slashdot and several other search
> > engines, and they don't say anything about text repetition in a page
> > devaluing it's ranking. 
> > 
> > If you can either give me a link or a specific title from the article,
> > I'll see if I can find it. 
> > 
> > Anyways, to get a better ranking in Google, you'd need some important
> > sites to link to Cygwin's install page.  I've always wondered how,
> > exactly, an "important" site is determined.  Simply having lots of links
> > to your site isn't enough to make it "important".  I wonder if RedHat's
> > site is considdered "important" enough.  If so, see if maybe the RedHat
> > folks would be willing to place a Cygwin link on their home page.
> 
> I thought that having lots of links to your site was *exactly* what made
> it important.

No, it's lots of *others pages* linking to *your pages* that's the key.
Linking to yourself doesn't make you self important in googles eyes.
They call that a type of rank sink and their ranking system
computationally factors such loops out (or at least it doesn't
artificially elevate the ranking of your self-linked pages). 

However, a hierarchy of links from other pages can create a type of
cascade effect that could lead to a higher ranking.  My original thought
was weither some site, such as redhat.com, had a sufficiently large
number of forward and back-links to it to be considder an important site.
If so, adding a link to cygwin might help elevate the ranking of cygwin's
pages.  It's some what like a social hierarchy. 

> Anyway I can't find the page where I got that understanding from.
> 
> The context that I can recall was that do defeat 'artificial' elevation
> of sites to the top of searches in google, google has heuristics to
> detect such attempts. The heuristics include lots of links to yourself
> (there was a shopping site somewhere that google effectively delisted,
> even though there was no attempt to make it rank highly, simply because
> the sites dynamically generated product list appeared to be a
> rank-elevating attempt), and detection of other such things (like
> repeated keywords). I hope this helps you find the reference.

Yep, however, googles ranking system does not appear to be affected by
the actual content of the page (or at least it's less important in the
ranking scheme), thus having lots of embedded comment strings, such as I
suggested earlier, would not be a detriment to googles ranking of Cygwin
pages, but might help improve its status for those engines which do
perform word/phrase count evaluation. 

Well, that's enough of that.  I feel this is a dead-end thread now and
should be considdered closed.  Time to get back to porting apps to Cygwin :)

> Rob

-- 
Peter A. Castro <doctor@fruitbat.org> or <Peter.Castro@oracle.com>
	"Cats are just autistic Dogs" -- Dr. Tony Attwood


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