Following the success of Google’s PageRank and other ‘rankers’, Cnet have realised news that Microsoft will release their own version website ranker called Browserank.
Google PageRank tool gathers rank from what Google feel is the most important page of a website, the quality and number of inbound links. This has been challenged by a number of SEO techniques including, paying for inbound links, reciprocal links with other websites and continues spamming of forums and blog comments, which Google have tried to include in the algorithm to still give property to actual strong websites.
Microsoft’s new Browserank tool works in a different way, it looks at the amount of time users spend browsing a page. Highlighting ‘linking’ flaws in Google’s Page rank tool such as link farms and other methods which can help push a website to the top of the listings Microsoft insist that their Browserank tool gathers the important characters of a website which makes more people want to browse, buy or leave. According to Cnet, Microsoft argues that by monitoring the actual behaviour of users on websites by browse time gives a more accurate understanding of users needs and this can be represented in their listings by using this algorithm.
What makes all these tools elementary is that none of them provide 100% accurate results of the popularity of a website, link farms can skew Google’s results, and now cloaking and open connections will be used to change the listings within Microsoft.
Even more important if there tool is used correctly what is to say that a particular website actually offers good content. A visitor on a particular ecommerce site may leave them on there for hours because of poor navigation or as simple as a user’s homepage could change listings and favour other websites and considering most UK homepages are set to BBC or Google, then Microsoft are still favouring the competition.
So if the Organic listings of the search engines can change by unethical Search Engine Optimisation techniques will this drive more traffic to the paid listings, which in the end is more money in the pockets of those search engines.
