Blogs and PageRank

Will the preponderance of blogs these days wreak havoc with Google’s PageRank model? It used to be that you couldn’t get a link from a big name site without having something they they wanted to link to. And if they linked to it, then they liked it, so others might as well, thus a higher PageRank. Not so anymore.

I can get a link on SixApart.com by posting a comment or a trackback. Ditto for Kottke. I can’t on Boing Boing, but I can on Don Park’s site. And there are a lot of other blogs out there with PageRank values of, say, seven and up that I can get a link on very easily.

This site, for instance, has a PageRank of six, and you can get a link from here by just saying some intelligent (sadly, we’ve taken steps to eliminate the PageRank value, but I may remove that because other steps have helped cure the spam problem).

So, with all these high PageRank sites out there, it’s getting easier to increase the PageRank of your own site. And you don’t even have to spam – even a dolt can come up with something intelligent to say about post. Keep it remotely relevant, you won’t get deleted, and – voila! – you just finagled a link from a site with decent PageRank.

This being the case, will PageRank’s relevance and value deteriorate over the next few years?

This begs another question – would Google ever allow you to designate links as self-service? By using a special comment or something, you could declare to the GoogleBot that you didn’t add these links yourself, instead they were added by the link’s target.

And if this happened, would you do it? Would you essentially screw your commenters? Would people be more likely to comment on blogs that advertised that they didn’t marginalize links using this method?

Who knows if Google has done this already? They could have built some detection methods into their algorithm to detect “comment-ish” links and consequently devalue them. Who knows what they’ve done already.