Mary's Pad

What’s the first thing you do when you need information on something? Go to the Library? Probably not! Instead, you fire up Google, or Yahoo, or AOL, and you search, right? If you remember, a while ago I posted about why you should not believe everything you see online. Well… let’s talk about a few more things you may or may not know.

If you’re a webmaster or blogger, you know what Google Page Rank and Alexa are, but if you’re not, let me try and explain – bear with me, it will make sense.

Google ranks websites according to how popular they are. How they determine this is somewhat of a mystery to me, but I do know that it has something to do with how many other websites link to that particular website, or the number of linkbacks as we call them in the webmastering world. The higher you rank in Google, the more popular (apparently) your website is. Kind of like if all the other kids on the playground know your name then you must be pretty popular (or notorious, as the case may be). The ranking goes from 0 to 10, and of course Google itself is ranked 10/10. Now there is a lot of heated debate about how accurate and objective the page ranking algorithm is, and Google Page Rank is a popular and sometimes hotly debated topic on the web. Just Google “Google Page Rank” and look around and you’ll see what I mean. I personally question it’s validity as a measure of popularity simply because it can be manipulated! If you go on webmaster forums, you’ll find a lot of link exchanges, where webmasters link to each other, or sell links to each other. The more highly ranked the website is, the more expensive it is to get them to link to you. Which brings me to the question – why is page rank important? Well, because the higher your page rank is, the more money you can make from it. Advertisers will generally pay more to have their ads on higher rank websites than on lower ranked ones. Similarly, other websites will pay more to have their links on your website if it has a higher Google Page Rank, than they will for a lower ranked linking. Now, as one of my favorite bloggers Jon says, every website must pay it’s own rent. To have this blog up, I pay some money every year for owning the name maryspad.com, and I also pay some money every month for the hosting space for the website. Similarly for my other websites. This is true for most websites unless they’re hosted on free accounts like Blogger.com, or WordPress.com.

OK, so the higher your page rank, the more you can make for the website to pay it’s rent, and for some extra change in your pocket. Now I blog for fun, and because I want to share what I know, such as on my Freelancing Tips blog, and my Programming blog, and my File Conversion Services blog. Digitize Domain is for my work stuff, as is File Conversion Services, and these are landing pages for my current and potential clients to get an idea of what I do. I have found it invaluable as a freelancer to have a website that says who I am and what I do. I do have some other websites and blogs that I have out there as an experiment to see if I can get some good monetary conversion back, and so far so good, I must say. But I won’t bore you to death with those. Now I am not sure what effect the Google Page Rank has on how the website shows up in the search engines. A lot of search engine results have to do with how optimized a website is to attract the attention of the search engine robots. I’m not quite an expert on this, so I won’t try to explain it until I know more about it.

So that’s Google Page Rank. Then there’s Alexa. Unlike Google, Alexa rates your website’s popularity by how much traffic you get – how many people visit your website. A new website can start anywhere in the 9,000,000′s, but as you get more and more traffic, that number gets smaller and smaller. Of course it would make sense that the more visitors a website gets the more popular it must be, right? Kind of like the more kids want to come over to your house for dinner and to play, the more popular you are, right? Well, not necessarily, at least not in the case of websites. Alexa ranking can be manipulated too. Again, on the webmaster forums, you’ll see people selling programs (bots) and services to direct artificial traffic to your website, which then makes Alexa think that you’re getting loads of visitors, and gets your ranking up. Similarly, spam will get a lot of traffic to a site. So when you get all that spam with all kinds of links, sometimes it’s malware, and sometimes it’s just for that purpose, to get someone some traffic to their website. Again, just like with the Google Page Rank, a good Alexa rating increases the chances of making more money with your blog or website. If you get a lot of traffic, then of course advertisers will pay a premium for a spot on your website or blog. Also, if you display what are called CPM advertisements, which basically means that you get paid each time that ad loads, then you will make more if you have more traffic. (There are many other ways to make money with a website, and high rankings in Google and Alexa never hurt, but I won’t go into all that. I need to get to my point.)

So this is all well and good, except for one thing. Money is a great motivator. If I can make money in my pajamas by slapping a few pages on the web and then driving traffic to those pages, don’t you think I’m going to try to?? Of course. The only problem is that there’s a bunch of us out there doing this, and in the process, we’re throwing a lot of information out there that’s of no real value, and is not necessarily accurate, because we want to make money. Now this scares me because I tend to depend a lot on the internet for information. When I find a new disease or procedure or something I know nothing about, whereas before I’d have found my way to the nearest library, now I just fire up Google and search! And who knows what kind of information I’m pulling up?

Have you noticed sometimes how you’ll enter a search phrase, and pull up all these websites that say absolutely nothing?? Or a bunch of them will all say the same thing? Well that’s because they’re not meant to be useful. They’re just meant to make you open them so that the owner can make some money.

I hate to sound so cynical, but I am a webmaster, I own a bunch of websites and blogs, I have a different perspective than the general internet user, I know what I’m talking about. There is a lot of junk information on the web that is just there for someone’s profit, and not for your knowledge. Anyone, ANYONE, can start a website and sound like they know what they’re talking about. It doesn’t take much effort, believe me. So if you’re going to depend on the internet for your information, you need to take special care where you pull your information from. Who’s the source? How credible is the website? Who’s behind it? This is especially important if you’re using the information to make a critical decision, or any decision that is of any consequence to you. If you need ongoing information about a topic, such as a medication, or an illness, or money, or such, please find a credible source that you’re sure of, and find something to double check your information on. And remember, books are a good resource too!

The internet is a wonderful resource, but make sure that you’re using it correctly!