“Google [the almighty search engine] relies mostly on two criteria: The number of sites that link to yours and, to a lesser degree, the content of your page as it relates to the keywords selected. (For example, the number of times the words appear on that page).” Greg Boser, Google hacker
A simple formula can be manipulated and a post by Wired this morning talks about a guy that hacks Google for a living and his company called WebGuerilla. As for me, I am not smart enough to spell “WebGuerilla” without looking it up and I have never even registered on a search engine, nor taken any steps to rise above the lowly rank assigned to me by the blogsophere. I refuse requests from people who offer to “increase my rating”. I guess you could call me a Cyber-Calvinist.
I like noted blogger Rebecca Blood’s top secret formula. “write a better blog” and people will read it, link to it, and that will drive up a Google page rank. I always laugh at people and e-mail about how to do we create a “Christian” Jason Kottke or Instapundit. My advice is to write a weblog as good as Jason Kottke first.
Andrew, you may be a cyber Calvinist but you do have a great blog as well!
It occurs to me as I read this that you could increase your own Google rating just by leaving comments, however pointless, all over everybody else’s blogs. Strange.