Is Google's Page Rank a Fixed Game?

Google's Page Rank^TM is part of the algorithm that the huge search engine uses to define an website's importance in a specific search. The rank is based on a score from 0 to 10 where zero in the lowest score and 10 is the highest. You can see the rough/rounded page rank in Google's toolbar. Lately there have been some issues that gave me pause, hinting to me that there may be an unfair human element that can manually change the Page Rank^TM for a specific website.

Why is this so important? It has been my experience that the rank a site gets from Google can greatly affect their position in the search results. For the small "Mom & Pop" shops this can mean a a difference of a few hundred or a few thousand a month. For the larger etailers this can mean 100's of 1,000's of dollars. Imagine that a site was not given the correct placement just because someone at Google changed the rank for their or a competing site. To give you an idea of the magnitude that this can have, I used to consult on a website that was selling around $20,000 per day. Now at some point this site was removed from the Google index for a few days. During those days, I think that they were selling less then 10% of what they were before they were removed.

OK, so where is my proof? A few days ago I visited the "Google Store"; the first thing that caught my eye was the fact that it had a rank of 9 out of 10. Out of curiosity I did a search on Google to see how many sites were linking to this store. Google listed 19 incoming links. How can this create such a high score? I have no idea. I also spoke with Eric Melin at SpiderSplat Consulting, Inc., and he too did not have a clue as to how this was possible unless Google was manipulating their rank. Before writing this I double checked the rank and number of links. The rank has now increased to 10 with about 12,000 incoming links. Not to sneeze at 12,000 links, but just to give you an idea according to Google there are 2,890,000 incoming links to www.google.com give it a rank of 10. So how can 12,000 links also give a 10? If it were that easy, there would be quite a few more sites with a 10.

OK, but it is their own tool, so shouldn't they be allowed to do what they want with it? I am not going to even try to give a legal opinion in this, but keep in mind that they are now a publicly traded company. However, they are the biggest search engine, and ethically I believe that they should not be able to give their e-commerce store an un-natural boost. Their store should be ranked just like everyone else's.