Google's PageRank Formula Reloaded

The PageRank formula is changing again. You might have heard that Google recently was granted a patent based on the "reasonable surfer" idea. For those of you in need of a quick refresh, a reasonable web surfer is someone given a random webpage who keeps clicking links forward to other pages without clicking back. This person eventually gets tired and goes to another random page. The likelyhood that a specific page will be clicked on as the random surfer goes through this process is that page's PageRank. While we're not going to get into the math behind it at this juncture (it's not needed in this example), you can see why Apple.com randomly gets clicked on frequently (it's a large global brand). It has a PageRank of 9 out of 10. 

Each link rank is independent of other links due to a number of variable changes. Some of these may include:

• Font size
• Location of link on pageList position (Top to Bottom)
• Font color, bolding and other attributes
• Number of words in link
• Keywords in the link
• Type of link: text, image, video
• Words surrounding the link (context)
• Does the link stay on the same website or link away?
• User behavior associated with links.

So the moral of the story here, in short, is don't expect your footer (links at bottom of the page) to be a powerful tool in transferring much link weight to other pages. I would think that highly relevant links which consider user behavior would perform well. Let's say a link says, "Article Cont...". If it has a good hook, the reader will likely click on to the next page to finish what they are reading. This link could pull from many of the factors in the patent such as context, font attributes, proximity to other words etc...

Links with a high potential to be clicked will likely have a higher weight, which "feels" like the right thing for Google to do in my opinion. You could argue that this makes business sense for Google because more links getting clicked means more ads being viewed. This translates into higher revenue for Google and a more trusted, better user experience.