Comments on: Page Strength Revisited

By: duz

duz — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:29:16 +0000

That’s a good point Brian. As Rand says “Even if the number we spit back isn’t all that valuable, the data certainly is…” which would be true if the data was reliable - which it isn’t. However as I said here “A very good example of Link Bait in action and a lesson for us all!”.

By: Brian Turner

Brian Turner — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 15:52:34 +0000

A couple of problems with the PAgestrength tool is that I can’t get my DMOZ or Wikipedia links to show.

Additionally, my UK sites get links from UK universities - which means .ac.uk links, not .edu links - so I feel sites like Platinax are somewhat underestimated by this process.

By: duz

duz — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 05:44:37 +0000

Bob - By scale I mean the minimum and maximum values only.

The choice of scale is arbitrary, will not affect the distribution and is usually chosen to make the variable easy to use or visualize.

ILQ, Page Strength and toolbar PageRank are all discrete variables i.e variables that can only have certain exact values (unlike continuous variables). Choosing the number of values a discrete variable has depends on the granularity of the parameters used in its calculation and the purpose to which it will be put.

By: bobmutch

bobmutch — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 01:43:51 +0000

That should have said you __are__ still working… not you are not working.

I agree on that if you multiply every value by 100,000 as you are still working with a scale of 0 to 10 (11 units in the case of Pagerank and 21 in the case of Rand’s tool that does halves).

By: bobmutch

bobmutch — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 17:30:45 +0000

duz:
I agree on that if you multiply every value by 100,000 as you are not still working with a scale of 0 to 10 (11 units in the case of Pagerank and 21 in the case of Rand’s tool that does halfs).

But if you have a real scale that has values of 0 to 100,000 you can show a wider variance between sites. I think this is one of the errors of Pagerank and one of the things that I wouldn’t be supprised to see Rand fix.

By: duz

duz — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 22:03:21 +0000

Bob the fact that PageRank and Page Strength are both on a 0 to 10 scale will not affect the correlation. For example we could multiply every value of Page Strength by 100,000 so that it was on a scale of 0 to 1,000,000 and the correlation would be numerically the same.

By: bobmutch

bobmutch — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 21:46:55 +0000

Aviva:
>>>It’s not entirely surprising to see such a close correlation between page strength and pagerank.

I agree! Using a 0 to 10 scale (really it’s a 20 unit scale due to using 1/2’s), you can’t expect it to be much different as Pagerank is not all the bad for showing the strength of sites.

By: Red Cardinal

Red Cardinal — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 09:31:40 +0000

Interesting findings Michael.

I still think that the Seomoz tool is very handy for aggregating various indicators that help assessing any given site/page.

But your study is still useful.

I presume your into statistical analysis? 4 years studying stats in university and I cant remember a bit of it

Cheers

Richard.

By: Aviva

Aviva — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 21:34:03 +0000

Michael, thanks for the interesting follow up!

It’s not entirely surprising to see such a close correlation between page strength and pagerank, given that pagerank is an element that is considered in assessing page strength, and given that linkage data is an important contributing factor to both measurements.

I agree with you that page strength is far from perfect and I don’t think that anyone is claiming that it is. But I think that your claim about the emperor’s new clothes is a bit unfair. It seems to me that page strength is the best measurement we have available at the moment because it is the only one that takes into account all the known ranking factors for which there is publicly accessible data. Sure, better tools can and probably will be developed.