Microsoft BrowseRank
filed in Internet Business on Aug.27, 2008
For the past few months the webmaster community (at least a part of it) is buzzing with the new Microsoft BrowseRank concept. It is a new (well not than new) page importance ranking principle set to outsmart Google PageRank. Despite all the uneducated criticism people address to Microsoft, I will say that BrowseRank can prove to be a good solution because you can theoretically manipulate PageRank by acquiring (sometimes buying) lots of backlinks but you cannot manipulate the behaviour of visitors (unless you buy them all or zomb them all).
It is what the Microsoft BrowseRank will be all about - it will monitor site’s traffic and visitor behaviour (bounce rate, total time spent on the site, etc.) When implemented it will be a ranking factor, fair and accessible to any webmaster regardless of his budget. Your task will be to provide value to your visitors. Where is value, there is high BrowseRank.
The problem with Google PageRank is that it sometimes doesn’t consider the worthiness of a page. You will find thousands of PR6, PR7 pages that has a total nonsense of content and hadn’t seen any traffic for the last five years. But still they got a high PageRank only because once loads of noobs linked to this page or what’s even worse - the webmaster used incentives (money, bonuses, begging) to get others to link to his nonsense.
The bad thing about Microsoft BrowseRank, however, is that it will be as difficult to collect information as it was for Alexa ranking algo. To show the whole picture of the traffic behaviour, either webmasters will have to embed more JavaScript or the visitors will have to download another toolbar.
At the moment Microsoft BrowseRank is undergoing a rigorous testing and it is unclear when it will be available for use. Will it replace PageRank? No, because of the technical difficulties I just described but it will be another interesting tool to provide an answer to the question: “Hey, dude, is this page any good?”
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