Item — HN Reader

Its a tricky thing to do as the potential for link-spam is very high. All one needs to do to rank his/her site high is to link to some authoritative/reputed site. Edit: One apparent fix is to assign smaller scores to outlinks as compared to inlinks. Even this is easy to game by setting up numerous pages to harvest outlink score, and then direct it to a page as an inlink.

Edit: Erm anything wrong with my comment ? This got voted down to -1.

As a graduate student I look into algorithms like these for ranking web pages.

This was with reference to dead-end websites and awarding a Pagerank like scores based on what my site points to (in addition to those who point to me)

2 comments

OT: this seems to be one of the most bizarre things I have seen on HN. For some reason my comment and the reply seems to have rubbed some the wrong way. It has been cycling up through -1 and 4.

Not complaining about the down votes, (and surely not about the up votes :) just that it is quite weird, and unlike anything I have experienced here on HN.

There's a difference between specifically penalising dead-end sites (or sites that only send linkjuice internally or to "low quality" sites) and scoring sites positively by number or quality of outbound links.

Yeah sure.I was commenting particularly about awarding scores based on outlinks.

I got down voted, I think because my comment was about web pages and it had got separated visually from the other comments about ranking web pages. So I added it in that my comment was about the discussion that had ensued about web pages.