Do PR 10 websites really exist? Yes, they do, and here’s a short sample of them:

http://www.google.com (of course)
http://www.adobe.com/
http://www.w3.org/
http://www.macromedia.com
http://www.energy.gov
http://www.nasa.gov
http://www.nsf.gov
http://www.whitehouse.gov
http://www.real.com

Google has awarded at least 100 or more sites awarded the distinguished PR 10 status. Yahoo!, however, is not one of them. It’s interesting how Google gives its top competitor only a 9 of 10, when clearly Yahoo is far more prominent than any of the other 10 PR sites. In fact, Alexa still ranks Yahoo! still the most popular website in the world, not for searches, but because of how much other content it has. Maybe Google is a little too stubborn to admit that.

Google performed another Page Rank (PR) update on Monday, April 28, 2008. Some websites’ PR went up; others went down.

With this update, I noticed a possible favoritism Google lended to newer links from social media sites. One of my websites has 10,000 incoming links, but no ‘fresh’ links from coverage in the social news media in recent months. The result of this last PR update was that site was taken down a notch in the PR rating.

Meanwhile, I had two smaller websites receive PR increases with fewer, but newer links. The news content and links were published to Digg and other social news websites. Delicious, Stumble Upon, and other social bookmarking sites were utilized, along with a presence in the blogosphere in more in recent weeks and months. RSS feeds were used along with a Wordpress blog and forum posts. These sites connected through the social media were impacted positively in the PR update- each moved up two notches on the PR scale. Not bad.

My hunch is that Google’s algorithm was tweaked to include more ‘timely’ link activity- especially valuing social news, bookmarking, PR newswires, and other sites showing reliably fresh content.

Wikipedia is simply a massive website that generates a significant volume of traffic. Since Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, why not edit it to your advantage?

If you run a business, your first step is to give your business its own dedicated Wikipedia page. Write text in a manner to make your page sound ‘noteworthy’. There is much Wikipedia content that doesn’t deserve its own pages, I wouldn’t worry about your site not ‘fitting in’. For instance, just for Star Wars, there are pages dedicated to Star Wars bounty hunters, fictional planets, and silly irrelevant controversies like ‘Han shot first’. If fiction deserves a page, surely you can make a strong case that your real-life business deserves its own recognition.

When you’re writing, make sure you include all of your business accolades and your own biography, if you’re the business owner. Sometimes newly submitted Wikipedia pages get deleted and sometimes they stick. If it gets removed, there’s nothing wrong with trying and retrying. One of my Wikipedia pages has been up for 2 years- and is successfully inter-linked with other pages in Wikipedia. That should be your goal.

My most successful Wikipedia edit was placing an external link to my website on a PR 7 page. This link is still there and brings about 600 visitors a month to my external site. If your link is actually relevant and provides value to the page, then it won’t get removed for link spam. And once your link survives a critical initial time period of a month or so, it may fall off the radar for some editors prowling to reverse people’s changes.

As far as the value of the external link itself, sure, the link has the ‘no follow’ attribute and in theory shouldn’t pass along any PageRank (PR) value to Google. However, the link still delivers good traffic and some SEO professionals argue that Google still favors being linked to from Wikipedia, even though it goes unreported.

One nice side-effect of being linked to from Wikipedia is you get a lot of incoming links from other Wikipedia clones. Especially nice for a new website, you can get a lot of incoming links in short order, by simply placing one on a popular Wikipedia page and having it ’stick’. Since the Wikipedia content is in the public domain, other websites are free to copy to make their own websites and often do. So, what happens is you end up getting not just a link from Wikipedia, but every other Wikipedia clone. It can add up. A newly created website from summer of 2007 now has more than 400 incoming links from various Wikipedia clone sites. That’s a nice way to get a website off the ground, in terms of initial link building.

Take advantage of Wikipedia. Just because they have the ‘nofollow’ attribute doesn’t mean we should give up posting relevant, meaningful, external links. And if your page and/or link gets removed, try modifying to make the page more educational and more relevant and re-submit. Persistence will pay off. Eventually, you’ll find Wikipedia can be very good to you.

People get movies in a variety of ways. The following are ways people commonly use to acquire movies for home viewing, but I only endorse the final and best method, which happens to be 100% free.

PAID OPTIONS:

1. Rent from Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. This is the most inconvenient and most expensive way to rent a movie.

2. On-Demand through Satellite TV. While convenient, it’s expensive and may have a limited selection.

3. Use iTunes. It’s $3.99/ea for new releases on demand. The drawback is you can only play them on your small, portable devices, unless you have the extra Apple TV equipment.

4. Use Netflix. At $4.99/mo, it would seem you can’t go wrong. But you have the hassle of sending and receiving mail.

5. Buy the DVD. (price varies)

FREE OPTIONS:

1. Copy DVDs from a friend (not recommended). It’s common for someone to acquire movies from any of the above paid options, or borrow from a friend, and burn a copy for yourself. People usually do this using free software like: DVDShrink and DVD Decrypter or paid ones like: DVDFab Decrypter or Nero. They remove all of the copy protection so you can burn your own copy. They allow you to either burn to a dual-layer 8GB DVD or standard 4GB DVD.

2. Download movies using bit torrents (not recommended). Bit torrents are the latest protocol in peer-to-peer file sharing. Almost any recent movie, video game, or music CD is shared online and available for downloading through bit torrent websites. There are major drawbacks to this way of getting free movies. Besides the ethical considerations, the download goes to your computer and may be difficult to convert to play on your regular TV. You also may get a virus or some spyware on your machine by downloading material from unknown sources. And finally, your IP address can be tracked and has the potential of being monitored by a governing authority.

3. The best way to get free movies (recommended) is through your local library. Yes, libraries across the United States commonly have DVD sections with growing selections of movies, including new releases. Instead of paying $3.99 or more at Blockbuster, it’s totally free to walk out the door with lots of DVDs just for using your free library card.

Some libraries even have honor system-type scanners where you check it out yourself and don’t stand in any lines. Instead of returning the movies the next day or in 3 days, libraries often let you check out your movies for a week or more at a time. You can then renew them a couple more times by calling in or renewing online. Many libraries have high limits on how many you can check out at a time, for instance up to 20 DVDs.

Libraries in larger cities are often all networked and allow you to reserve anything you want online. For instance, near Portland, Oregon, users may login to the library network for Washington County and search and reserve DVDs online, and they will then send the DVDs to your nearest library and give you a call when it comes in. Some people with disabilities may even have them delivered to their door. In other cases, if you’re looking for a more obscure DVD title, you can simply request it and they may special order it for you (all for free).

Libraries are faster than Netflix, often include tens of thousands of DVDs to choose from (including new releases), are convenient (if you live near a library), and free. Why even take time to burn DVDs for your own home use? Your tax dollars already paid for your local library to stock all of these DVDs for you to use. Just pretend you’re part owner of it (which you are) and check them out whenever you need and return when you’re done. Easy.

Yesterday on 4-12-08 was a nice summer-like day. I drove to Cougar, WA with my camera and hiking boots and decided to check out Merrill Lake. I ended up hiking about 3 miles through the snow (uphill both ways, of course).

I did not see anyone else on the whole time, but there were cars parked with their snowmobile trailers.

Someone did a nice parking job. That tree probably saved their life. If it wasn’t there, they surely would have rolled downhill a couple thousand feet to the bottom of the canyon.