Video transcription
We’ve got a fun question today from Studio Three X in New York.
Studio Three X wants to know about porn.
Specifically, what are the technical reasons porn sites have such low pagerank? None go over PR6.A lack of links from trusted sites? Rampant link exchanges with low quality sites? Penalties for affiliate links? Or is there a general penalty on the porn industry?
Great question.
I really enjoyed that one.
Of course, it’s definitely the case that if there’s little quality links, we will tend to try to write algorithms that don’t necessarily trust those links.
But if I had to take a guess, here would be my guess.A lot of people think that pagerank corresponds to popularity, and that’s not really true.
Let me give you a very simple example to illustrate that.
The Iowa Real Estate Commission Board probably gets a fair number of links, even though maybe not that many people visit it, because it’s an official government site, or because it’s a site that people know about. But people very rarely link to porn sites.
Even though a lot of people visit a lot of a porn sites.So, if pagerank we’re popularity, porn sites would have a lot of pagerank. But pagerank isn’t.
It looks at the number of links, and the quality of those incoming links.
You tend not to see a lot of links from the New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, pointing to porn sites.
So it’s really just an expression of the fact that pagerank tends to look at high quality links, and not that many people tend to link that much to sites within the porn industry.
From all the stuff that I’ve looked at, that would be my experience.
And you also get a little bonus dollop of learning that pagerank is reputation.It’s not just pure popularity.
There’s definitely an element where people link to the sites that they think are high quality, and that explains why probably, in general, pagerank is a little bit lower for the porn industry.
Quick Answer: People don’t tend to get good links to porn sites