Algorithms For Dummies

 Exploring the World of Graphs

It’s essential to distinguish Black Hat SEO from White Hat SEO (usually simply 

SEO). People who use White Hat SEO are professionals who employ their 

knowledge of search engines to better promote valid and useful pages in a 

legal and ethical way.

The emergence of such actors and the possibility of manipulating search engines’ 

results created the need for better ranking algorithms in search engines. One such 

result is the PageRank algorithm.

Explaining the PageRank Algorithm

The PageRank algorithm is named after Google cofounder Larry Page. It made its 

first  public  appearance  in  a  1998  paper  entitled  “The  Anatomy  of  a  LargeScale 

Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, published by 

the journal Computer Networks and ISDN Systems (

http://ilpubs.stanford.

edu:8090/361/1/1998-8.pdf

). At that time, both Brin and Page were PhD candi-

dates, and the algorithm, the very foundation of Google’s search technology, was 

initially a research project at Stanford University.

Simply stated, PageRank scores the importance of each node in a graph in such a 

way that the higher the score the more important the node in a graph. Determin-

ing the node importance in a graph like the web means computing whether a page 

is relevant as part of a query’s results, thus better servicing users looking for good 

web content.

A page is a good response to a query when it matches the query’s criteria and has 

prominence in the system of hyperlinks that ties pages together. The logic behind 

prominence is that because users build the web, a page has importance in the 

network for good reason (the quality and authority of the page’s content is 

assessed by its importance in the web’s network of hyperlinks).