The traffic you get from people following links is measurable (and real!) The traffic you get from "link juice" is imagined.
The original PageRank paper assumed that PageRank approximated the distribution of views on web pages assuming that people followed links at random.
If Google wanted to know what people are viewing today, they don't need to collect a link graph and do matrix math. They can measure it directly with Chrome, Google Analytics and data exhaust from the advertising platform.
The original PageRank paper assumed that PageRank approximated the distribution of views on web pages assuming that people followed links at random.
If Google wanted to know what people are viewing today, they don't need to collect a link graph and do matrix math. They can measure it directly with Chrome, Google Analytics and data exhaust from the advertising platform.