An article published in MediaPost News http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=101490 describes a recent controversy where certain companies are trying to manipulate Google’s PageRank to have their own websites ranked higher in the web searches. 

One such company is Kmart, which is awarding selected bloggers on the popular blog SocialSpark free shopping sprees and asking them to write about their shopping experiences in blogs. Many of these blogs contain direct links to websites affiliated with Kmart, and these in-links increased the PageRank of many of these pages because, as was mentioned in lecture, in-links are a key variable in determining the PageRank.

This move has drawn criticisms from Google because Google requires any paid blogs that contain links to the sponsoring company to use a “no-follow” HTML tag, which essentially prevents these links from affecting the PageRank of the sponsoring company.Google has threatened to demote the PageRank of websites that continue to violate the rule to include “no follow” tags. In response, many blogs started to require all links to contain no-follow tags. 

 Interestingly, many other popular search engines, such as those sponsored by Microsoft and Yahoo, do not require the use of “no-follow” tags. 

This article shows that the PageRank algorithm still contains numerous loopholes that can be manipulated to compromise its accuracy. The requirement of the “no follow” tag is a rule that can never be efficiently enforced by Google. Therefore, the algorithm needs to be continuously improved to address problems like these and deal with the increasing complexity of the internet.