Why popular porn sites tend to have lower page rank?
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Lower PageRank for porn sites

Lower PageRank for porn sites - answered by Matt Cutts

Summary:

A lot of people think that pagerank corresponds to popularity, and that's not really true. PageRank depends very much on high quality links and porn sites don’t really have many links from trustworthy sites even if they are really popular.

 

Matt's answer:

Great question. I really enjoyed that one. Of course, it’s definitely the case that if there’s little quality links, we will tend to try to write algorithms that don’t necessarily trust those links. But if I had to take a guess, here would be my guess. A lot of people think that pagerank corresponds to popularity, and that’s not really true. Let me give you a very simple example to illustrate that. The Iowa Real Estate Commission Board probably gets a fair number of links, even though maybe not that many people visit it, because it’s an official government site, or because it’s a site that people know about.

 

People very rarely link to porn sites

Even though a lot of people visit a lot of a porn sites. So, if pagerank we’re popularity, porn sites would have a lot of pagerank. But pagerank isn’t. It looks at the number of links, and the quality of those incoming links.

 

You tend not to see a lot of links from the New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, pointing to porn sites. So it’s really just an expression of the fact that pagerank tends to look at high quality links, and not that many people tend to link that much to sites within the porn industry. From all the stuff that I’ve looked at, that would be my experience.

 

Pagerank is reputation. It’s not just pure popularity

There’s definitely an element where people link to the sites that they think are high quality, and that explains why probably, in general, pagerank is a little bit lower for the porn industry.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: