By Jack Strawman

A few weeks ago I found myself in the subway of New York City. Posters and billboards from a prominent bank promoted credit card decaled the underground landscape.

These well-crafted advertisements promised ten dollars back for every $100 spent on subway fares. It gave the current economic crisis and recession as the explanation for their incredible generosity and compassion.

Everybody around me seemed thoroughly impressed by this overwhelming gesture of selfless charity; many discussed in earnest how they were planning to sign up for this card to enjoy these charitable savings. It seemed I was the only one, the Christmas Grinch of the crowd, who perceived this advertisement strategy as more cunning and brilliant than selfless and generous. What an ideal time to hook people on yet another credit card, especially with the holiday season already upon us. Obviously the long-term interest this credit card company was anticipating far overshadowed their likely short-term promotional costs.

Indeed it was a cunning and brilliant strategy, much the same, I thought to myself, as Google’s page rank system.

At first glance it seems a very wise, fair and indeed brilliant system for determining positioning within the search ranks. On closer inspection, however, it is even more brilliant and cunning than most are giving it credit.

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By Mel Richardson

How good is your Web site?

Is your Blog up to par?

There are actually websites that will measure the ranking of your website. For those of you that don’t know what page rank is, it’s a tool put together by Google that determines the effectiveness or efficiency of your Web site.

The higher your page rank, the higher your Web site is listed in the various search engines, and that means more traffic to your site. This, in essence, means more people are looking at your site, your products, your services, thus putting more money in your pocket in the form of paying customers.

If more people are going to your Web site then less traffic is going to your competitors’ Web site. Unfortunately most people don’t even know what page rank is but those visitors that do will place your website in a higher esteem than your competitors and feel that your content is much more valuable and insightful.

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…and double the number of your pages indexed in Google! — By Geoff Hineman

Of the many techniques available to SEOs, perhaps the most hotly debated is the use of the nofollow tag for PageRank sculpting. While many SEOs support nofollow as a proven and verifiable way to help important pages rank higher, others approach it with hesitation, preferring instead to adjust their site architecture or their robots.txt file.

This report pulls back the curtain and takes a closer look at the mystery and even danger surrounding the different techniques available for using nofollow to sculpt your PageRank.

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