Rank Sinks

Consider a page U that has only one link to V, where V has only one link — to U. Suppose further that another page T has a link to U. What can we say about the PageRanks R_T, R_U, and R_V of T, U, and V, respectively?

Ignoring other pages, the computation A * R yields

and

That is, the equation R = A * R passes the PageRank between U and V — with additional PageRank coming from T. This situation is called a rank sink, as rank tends to accumulate on pages U and V without passing onward to other pages.

created: 10 February 2007 last revised: 16 February 2007

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