Strauss
this isn't entirely true, I'm ranked for terms on pages that intentionally have no internal nor external links (nothing in nothing out). Google will index and rank you. for things even if you have 0 links. sure these terms are for testing purposes but the terms rank for the page that they are intended to rank for. What was interesting to me was the way Google found the content, when you submit your sitemap to Google via Google Search Console (GSC) it's in a crawl queue, seems keyword and entity density have some weighting in this space, I'm sure backlinks would have made a big difference but the rules of this test were 'no backlinks generated by myself' , and the keyword is so obscure that there would be no external backlinks made by anyone
Ammon Johns ^🎓 » Strauss
So, your anecdotal evidence, vs the actual papers and patents STATING that orphan pages are completely removed and ignored from the dataset before PageRank calculations are run, and, if you understand the math, the absolute certainty they are telling the truth (because otherwise the whole formula cannot work).
PageRank is an iterative (reiterative) calculation that absolutely depends on pages having links in and links out, and it doesn't end until the average value of all links settles on a score that relies on that fact. NOT ignoring orphan pages breaks the entire mathematical formula.
Strauss
I can show you the test and experiment, it is still running. I wasnt trying to be obtuse / argumentative or disrespectful, I have no horse in this race other than that sometimes reality doesn't match the patent. The engine seems not necessarily to make use of all the patents that are owned by Google. Nor that every patent owned is always implimented to its fullest. message me when you have some time and Il zoom screenshare. I'm not making a call on your opinion, I'm just stating what I have and am still observing. Based on field observations page rank isn't the only factor that determines if a 'page' can rank for a keyword, also I would think that passage ranking has possibly reduced the influence page rank had.
Ammon Johns ^🎓 » Strauss
There are several situations in which normal ranking rules are not applied, and a few others where PageRank is dialled down as a factor.
Local Search, for example, almost completely ignores PageRank in its signals, which it has to do for it to not be constantly recommending the highest population areas in your geographic vicinity (which will naturally have far more chances of links from high PR sources) – such as if you lived in a suburb or village 50 miles outside of a major town or small city.
Then there is the use of backfill and secondary index stuff – even today, if an extremely rare or unlikely keyword combination means that very few documents are returned, Google will possibly turn to additional data centers, and even to results it would not normally surface – even documents it has never crawled but has seen links using the term pointing to.
However, in anything that uncompetitive I would very much resist using the word 'ranking' at all, as it is largely just down to any kind of inclusion, without much ranking factor consideration at all.
Outside of Local Search, pretty much everything else uses PageRank as a signal, and often as a compounded signal, since PageRank is still, I believe, one of the many factors that play into crawl priority, and thus also affects 'freshness' factoring, etc.
Strauss » Ammon Johns
I had a think about this case, this entire scenario. Because there is a factor in my test sites, that may sidespet this patent. If a page is built on a site and excluded from nav (as mine are) and not interlinked to (as mine are) nor linked from (also. as mine are) but… are added to a sitemap, and the sitemap is submitted to Google, naked-url citation in the sitemap concidered as a link to add the page to the page rank calculation?
Ammon Johns ^🎓 » Strauss
That's something Google have never specified that I can recall, but I have always assumed that a sitemap classes as a search accessible URL, and thus any recognizable citation or link within it counts as a link.
Strauss » Ammon Johns
Yeah which then raises another scenario, there are a few at play here, if the Content Management System (cms) creates the sitemap then most sites won't have pages that aren't in the sitemap, even if they aren't linked to, I think once you link out from something to something else then by Google's definition your linking entity falls out of the orphan definition. I am going to set up 10 domains next week with a variety of random alpha linked, unlinked, and only nofollow link pages of different lengths and keyword densities to see if they are indexed. in a prev test I did I merely increased density of a term on a homepage and they were all indexed and ranked within 3 days. so this will be interesting.
Ammon Johns ^🎓 » Strauss
It will certainly be interesting. The last time I saw a genuine issue first-hand where a page was indexed with no links at all, not even in the sitemap, was back when I was an Admin for a major Search Engine Optimization | SEO forum, and the cause, we believe, was that the old Google Toolbar (with PageRank meter) was installed, and naturally pings Google the URL of every page viewed in order to request its TBPR score…
There's a lot of the same and similar pingback features built into Chrome (and other browsers), where they are coded to ping the creators with every page ever viewed, ostensibly in order to check it is not spam or malware and for your 'security'…
BUT, this then brings us to the major and significant differences between knowing a URL exists, crawling a URL, rendering the URL, and Ranking the URL in searches, each of which is an entirely different step and process.
Only the other day Gary Illyes was explaining that even directly submitting a page via the submission tool does not automatically get that page indexed, as even at that stage there are 2 'quality checks' made, one to check if they believe it is worth crawling, and a second to check if what they captured is worth including in the index.
Strauss » Ammon Johns
Yeah re the quality checks, whatever metric they use there doesn't seem to be quality of content based as I have 10 pages indexed for random alpha, eh no real words on page. so the quality of the pages ability to present consumable content seems to be the req. and the test is to see how well a unique random alpha term ranks and they have pretty much all been in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) 1-10 since day 3. (for about 3 months now) – I'm traveling abroad atm, but Il ping you to show you later.