Thursday, October 2, 2008

Regarding Page Importance

Sir,

When you were discussing about page importance you mentioned about the amount of access a page gets as one of the criteria for evaluating importance. I have 2 questions on that.

1. There are lots of websites which display the number of visitors for that page. How do they compute that?
2. Is there any relevance to that for computing the page rank for that page? If yes can this make the website owners to increase the page rank of their website by logging in again and again themselves and make it to the top of the rank?

2 comments:

Sushovan De said...

The owners of a web page can track the number of web pages by simply incrementing a counter in a database on their server every time they get a request for their page.
Search engines might want to use this information, but they dont because (1) they dont have access to it, and (2) as you said, even if they had access to it, web-admins may cheat and increase their numbers.

That being said, there are some programs, like Google's own "Google Analytics", where google asks you to insert a small javascript into your website, and then gives you lots of statistics for free on your site, in return, they get authentic usage information for your site.

bharadhwaj said...

and reg. your concern about the admin of a site repeatedly logging to increase page hits..
hitting on a page does not increase hits if the hit is from the same ip address. if however, the admin/the site promoters do this from different ip addresses each time..the hits are bound to increase..but considering the many other factors in computing page importance that we discussed, like number and importance of the backlinks, it is usually very difficult for an actually unimportant page to come up on the ranklist