It's Like Déjà Vu All Over Again
"You could probably waste an entire day on the preceding links alone. But why take chances? We also give you Paul Snively..." — John Wiseman, lemonodor
Jim Roepcke raises a good point about the Google boxes that are starting to appear on UserLand weblogs and other places: They're going to undercut Google's ability to rank pages, because every box artificially increases the rankings for the links in that box. [Workbench]
I don't get it. In what sense is it "artificial" if Google indexes my page and notices that I have links to already-highly-PageRanked pages? Remember, PageRank has already proven quite attack resistant, as it was designed to be. But GoogleBoxes don't even constitute an attack; they constitute just another instance of the kind of linking that PageRank deliberately, explicitly uses.
Besides, one page's GoogleBox is just one more link to the site in question. It's not even statistically significant. And if people are coming to your page because they're interested in what you're interested in, and you've provided a GoogleBox based on that interest, why wouldn't you send them off to other highly-credible related sites?
GoogleBoxes are just a convenient way to use Google's PageRank as a trust metric for web content. Far from subverting the purpose of PageRank, they reinforce it.
12:46:52 PM Google It!
