Google Link Farm Patent - How Google Ranks Nodes in a Linked Database Based on Node Independence?

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Google may restrict the value of link passed by a high authority site if it is sure that the linked site is an affiliate or bears any relationship with the main site. Many of the link farm sites that were created in the past had followed this strategy to capitalize on the Page Rank factor in order to artificially increase the ranks of their websites by gaining links from a variety of high authority domains that they already owned or by taking PAID links. This practice gave rise to spam in the search results because it defeated the sole purpose of returning high quality and relevant resources based on Page Rank (that got manipulated by Link Farms or PAID linking).

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In order to stop this practice, Google has been recently granted a patent named “Ranking nodes in a linked database based on node independence”. This patent describes that multiple links from affiliated nodes (webpages) are deemphasized, enabling them to pass a little value of the overall importance of the web page. Many high authority commercial sites often link to each and every of its affiliated site in order to pass on the full value of the domain to its affiliated sites. But, this patent points to techniques that can be algorithmically
applied to reduce the possible effect on the rank by a single entity (single resource, node or a domain), such as a commercial “link farm” attempting to artificially boost the rank of certain nodes. Also, the maximum vote amount that a single node can pass is capped to a full vote value. A high authority or high linked resources also known as “super nodes” often receive an extremely high number of inbound links and therefore has the power to boost the rank of any other node it links to. But, such nodes are restricted from having undue influence on the ranks of the nodes to which it links. This is done by checking the possible affiliation or ownership to the nodes the super node links to. Checking WHOIS information and several other techniques are applied in order to find out this relationship.

Check out the full patent here: Ranking nodes in a linked database based on node independence

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