27/01/16 // Written by Emma Phillips

John Mueller Google Hangouts Session: Link Analysis and PageRank

Google frequently arranges live Google Hangout sessions online, hosted by its Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, who runs one-on-one sessions with a select group of search specialists.

Dan Picken, of Ingenuity Digital’s sister company WMG, attends these sessions to ensure he’s at the leading edge of search science, asking the questions that will enable us to keep our clients’ businesses fully optimised online.

On 15 January 2016, Dan asked the following question:

When Google analyses a link from a site, does the algorithm decide whether PageRank should pass to a page and if so what are the levels to this?

 With this question we wanted to determine from Google whether or not there were factors that affected the release of PageRank from one site to another. So for example, would Google use its interpretation of the quality of a site in order to assess where PageRank should pass through freely or not?

Examples of quality we were thinking about were things like:

  • Would you trust the information presented in this article?
  • Does the article describe both sides of a story?
  • Does this article provide a complete and comprehensive description of the topic?

So on that basis is it reasonable to surmise that Google could use elements of the Panda algorithm to better inform Penguin and adjust levels of PageRank to be passed over. This was just a theory so Dan put this question to John Mueller, a web trends analyst at Google and he said they try to keep algorithms separate in that they do not have two algorithms analysing the same thing, so onsite quality wouldn’t really play a part in whether PageRank should pass from one site to another.

He further goes on to say:

“I think the main issues that we see there are really if we recognise that this is a site that it doesn’t make any sense to pass any PageRank from. Then, on a site level, we might say, OK, we’re not going to pass any PageRank from here.

That can happen, for example, if we can tell this is a site where people have been spamming their links for a long time, and it’s maybe an open forum where all the links are followed, and it’s filled with clutter.”

So this led on to another question which was:

So where does this leave directories or affiliates?

He essentially tells us that this is “not by design” as an affiliate and directory “can be pretty useful” and “their business model doesn’t dictate the type of site they have”, therefore it doesn’t mean that the content these types of sites have is low quality. When it comes to directories it can be a little bit trickier he admits. If the directories just blanket allow any link to be followed then they probably will just not trust it.

Also a shout out to Barry Schwartz, owner and editor at SEO Roundtable who covered our question https://www.seroundtable.com/google-stop-pagerank-links-21493.html Thanks Barry!

You can see our questions and answers here:

https://youtu.be/gfXGfvKJnPY?t=256