A proposal for SiteRank

GoogleGuy Says: [Link to quote]
So you're proposing a site penalty ~= k * (number of queries hitting the site / number of pages on the site).

Let's see. There's a couple real-world problems. I don't think that adding this in scoring would impact how users search--this would be far enough removed that they'd have problems realizing when their search terms were too general. There's also the problem of defining the scope of a site (is a site mit.edu, lcs.mit.edu, or lcs.mit.edu/~somestudent, etc.). I can imagine people that share the same ISP/host shouting at each other: "Your pages are too popular! All those hits on just 1-2 pages! You're killing my Re5earcherRank!" :)

Leave that aside though. To minimize the penalty, you'd want to either minimize the number of queries that hit the site, or maximize the number of pages that are indexed. I do think that would lead toward a trend of spreading out content to a series of really focused pages. In the limit, it could take you to more doorway pages. Maybe not necessarily, I'm just sketching out the extremes. It would definitely discourage single pages with lots of content.

Hmm. Probably the biggest benefit would be for sites like namebase.org, where each page is an entry for a different person. Re5earcherRank would work so well for namebase.org because each "keyword phrase" (in this case a person's name) is orthogonal to most of the other keywords that someone could use to find other content on the site. But it wouldn't work as well for longer/more complex/less orthogonal queries that need multiple words to match on one page.

I'd also worry a little that people who didn't know anything about Re5earchRank would be penalized by it. The natural inclination of a good site owner (produce lots of good, original content that surfers find useful) would work counter to them if they put the content on a small number of pages, but would work better if they put the same content on a larger number of pages. So Re5earcherRank would be a force pushing site architectures toward more pages per site, but not everyone would be aware of it.

It could also encourage people to promote throwaway domains. As soon as the site penalty started to creep up for one site, you'd discard it and begin promoting a different site. But you don't need me to play toolman, he can do that himself. This is fun stuff to think about though. I should drop by this forum more often; it's fun to play spammer for a change. :)