Holy Friggen Crap! Page Rank 4!!!

Yeah, that’s right, 4, four.  Note my meteroic rise – last time I checked it was N/A, as in null, as in not even a zero. I’m coming up like a rocket. Even Adam of the North and Forest’s Fine Photography don’t have PR 4 blogs! Most experts will tell you that’s almost meaningless, but most “experts” would cut off their grandmother’s right arm for an extra point. And that, dear reader, is the point.

Let’s take a step back and cover the basics. Page Rank is a number Google publishes for every page they know about. Google is the search engine (it’s a freaking verb!), so while companies can find new customers by advertising, if they can get them from Google, there’s no fee, but a potentially abundand stream of shoppers. At one time commercial traffic was banned from the internet, but it seems like these days that’s all there is. The PR number is calculated from the number and PR of pages that link to a URL, so links from high PR pages have become a commodity in and of themselves. Some would even rather have PR than visitors, because it helps them sell more links, which are in essense nothing. The things have tremendous value because people think they have value.

Rather than waste my time “link building” I’ve strived to provide something worth reading, and to capture my thoughts as they leave an impression upon me. Some of these are quite short, and others are dissertations. The cartoons (Cyanide and Happiness) crack me up, but each one represents the best of 50+ I looked at, to find one worth showing to my readers. While many in the SEO industry seek out sites that might link to them, I spend hours looking for sites to link to, worth my reader’s time and attention. Nareev, who writes intelligently about pressing international questions is one example. If you like what I write about, his Blackwater article is a must see.

So I don’t do “off page” SEO which means emailing people begging for links. I don’t do on page SEO, either, which is basically web design. WordPress doesn’t let me change much of that. I can set the title and use <H1> and down on to 6 tags, mostly because I think as a stream of consciousness, and find it easier to express myself that way. Finally, my blog doesn’t really have much of a theme, or a criteria for publiciation. Many have said foolish things like getting links from sites that aren’t “topically related” to you will cause a Google ban. And yet this blog is about social consciousness, republican bashing, occasional computer programming tips when I’ve ben stuck and cried Eureka!