The following post has nothing to do with online shopping and/or bargain hunting. If you don't have a blog (or a web site) and the term Page Rank doesn't ring a bell to you then stop reading now. The rest of this post will most likely be boring... well... maybe not, let's see.
Since I started this blog I unwillingly had to learn a great deal about blogging. I read a few success stories, and also found that Search Engine Marketing is a big part of any online enterprise including a blog. Why is it?
In the real world people find about things by the word of mouth, via advertising, and by searching for things in libraries and archives. In the Cyberspace things work almost the same way except the searching part has gotten somewhat crippled -- the single "Highest Authority" pretty much defines these days what we see in the search results.
However it is not the search that I want to cover first but the word of mouth -- the most powerful and influential way of communication. The alternative in Cyberspace is a URL (or Universal Resource Locator). That is right, that link you click on a page works as a reference by the current page to the one you are going to.
The more references (or inbound links) a web page collects the more friends so to speak it has. The more friends - the better for the page in terms of its chances to be found on the Internet -- and not just via references -- via the search engine as well. More about it later.
Just as in the real world not all references are equal. Those that come from popular/well established web pages have the highest value. Google ranks the value of a page by Page Rank (a number from 1 to 10). Page Rank is a combination of several factors: its age and number of inbound links are the most important ones.
Now things get a little more complex. If a page has 100 outbound links the value it passes to the referred pages by each link is just 1/100th of the entire value it could pass. So to say, you can only refer so many people before your referral ability starts to degrade -- just as in real life.
Everything works well while things go natural. You blog about something and place a link to a news source. For you it is a way to pass some value to the page that provided you with the knowledge you based your blogpost on. For the source page it is a way to gain credibility and increase its Page Rank.
Why is it important to have high Page Rank? When you search for something using Google all other factors equal (pages have equally relevant information) that page will show first in the results which has higher Page Rank. Google simply makes an assumption that the higher ranked page has a better chance to provide you with the information you are looking for.
Now, what happens if things go wrong. How can they? One of the examples is described here.
...make a new theme for wordpress and make it public. Submit it to all the wordpress theme sites you can find... and wait. If the theme is decent, people will start using it on their site. Make sure you include a link back to your site somewhere in the theme...
All is fine if the links point to the source of that blog theme... If not then link farms like this (site updated since I wrote this article) end up with Page Rank 6. To compare the most popular bargain site on our list has a rank just slightly higher: 7.
Another abnormality is to make a blog posting like this.
All bloggers love links, and I am no exception. If you have any sort of website, be it big or tiny, webpage or blog, MySpace or Xanga, whatever, just add a new link on *your* site to your favorite post on *this* blog
The guy actually offers a reciprocal link back but even if he links every page that linked him his web site still gains in rank since the value his page passes on is evenly diluted among all links while the referring pages most likely don't have that large number of outgoing links and as a sum will give him more value.
Was his Page Rank gained in a natural way? I say no. It was in essence gamed.
What is the outcome -- our ability to search for relevant information is affected. Here is an extreme example of what can happen. Try searching Google for "miserable failure" or just "failure" and see what comes first in the results. Though this might be an exaggerated case -- it is what ultimately can happen.
Having said that, what I personally think about it? Frankly I am not too much concerned. We are not talking about fooling people here. It is Google and its algorithms that are fooled. Ultimately it is our own weakness that we have gotten used so much to rely on Google. If you try that same trick using say MSN Live Search - the result will not look the same. And the last, as the ways we communicate develop so do the rules our society lives by. Right now the model used by Goggle works the best -- it doesn't mean things will stay the same tomorrow.
Read here and here if you want to learn more about how Google search works and how it can get confused.
Haha, I think you are waaaaaay too focused on Page ranking and all this Google stuff. I mean, you participated in my giveaway yourself, then e-mailed me multiple times for a link to your own site within just one day, and even got angry and accused me of only linking to “popular” sites when I didn’t publish your link within a few hours.
Jonathan, if you post comments like this you most likely have not read the post to the end. Patience my sir…
I got angry because I like people to keep their word and as you correctly admitted you were not clear with your rules.
As for the giveaway and stuff, a great idea, I might do something like this later one. I even seriously consider designing a WordPress theme…
Here is one more hack. Get a PR boost after registering with 5000 forums:
http://onlinemarketingreport.b.....ister.html