August 14, 2008

Why Should You Start a 9/11 Blog or Website? Understanding Page Rank



Why Should You Start a 9/11 Blog or Website? Understanding Page Rank

By Arabesque

A 911blogger user named
Orangutan writes:
"I didn't understand the concept of linking an article in multiple places means higher search ranking. That makes sense."
This is an important concept. How does a Google search actually work? How do they determine what websites get higher rankings in search results? Well it turns out that they invented a mathematical formula to determine website rankings. Wikipedia explains:
"PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E)."
Rankings go from 0-10. 911blogger currently has a rating of 6. My blog has a rating of 4 (so does truthaction.org). Now, as you can imagine, if I have a high traffic website and I link to another website, I am increasing the visibility of that website more than linking from a website that has no visitors. You can download the google toolbar, which will disclose the page rank of any website you visit. Wikipedia explains that, "The Google Toolbar's PageRank feature displays a visited page's PageRank as a whole number between 0 and 10. The most popular websites have a PageRank of 10. The least have a PageRank of 0."
You can also visit www.top25web.com to discover the page rank of a website.

There are other important factors for page ranking. If you link to yourself (i.e. with your own website) a million times, it will not affect page rank. Why? Because sites with their own IP address do not contribute to the value of a website link. This is pretty clever because Google realized that if you linked to your website a million times on your own site, you could artificially make it appear higher in search rankings. Which is why Google designed this formula to avoid this potential issue. A video on the subject explains,

"Page rank is influenced significantly by the amount of people that link to your site... you do want external links that link to your site... these can come from a number of sources. The top four sources would be blogs, authoritative sites (government sites), articles... and press releases. My preference among all of those... is blogs. Links from blogs is an easy way to get links back to your site."


For example, if I had 1000 links from just
truthaction.org or just 911blogger to my website, these links would all have the same IP address. This means that having many links from the same website is not as valuable as having links from many different websites. The variety and number of websites is what will increase page rank, visitors, and exposure for 9/11 truth. In other words, if we all just hanged out at 911blogger and didn't make our own blogs, we would have limited exposure. By creating separate sites we are significantly increasing exposure for not only sites like 911blogger, but for 9/11 awareness, which is what really matters.

Which it turns out, this is another incentive to create your own 9/11 blog or website. By doing this, you are increasing the visibility of sites like 911truth.org and 911blogger when you link to them, assuming that you add links to these sites.

Let's take for example, the 11th day of every month campaign. If all of the photos and videos from this activism campaign were only posted at
truthaction.org, not many people will come across this activism. By having thousands of 9/11 activists creating their own blogs, posting their own activism and linking to sites like truthaction.org and 911blogger.com, the exposure of 9/11 information would be increased by a significant degree.