Nearly three months after it first acquired a PageRank (PR) score of three last April, this blog’s home page again improved its worldwide importance in the eyes of Google during its third quarter PR update of 2008 with an increase of additional one point, resulting a groundbreaking score of PR4. Online marketers, especially bloggers, commonly see this as a significant increase of popularity and advertising value. Now, as the owner of John Raul Dot Com blog, I would like to tell some points to help if you are still struggling on getting a good PageRank.

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It always feels good when hard work pays off. In my case, I’ve been running this blog for almost five months now and today for the first time, Google’s second quarter PageRank (PR) update for 2008 finally brought PR3 to this blog. PageRank is Google’s view of how important the pages of my blog are and they somehow influence advertisers with their own Web standards.The PageRank gauge can be seen when you install Google Toolbar on your web browser.

Wikipedia defines PageRank (PR) as:

…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.

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Sometimes, reading only web hosting reviews don’t suffice in your search for a good web hosting company that can provide your hosting needs at an affordable price. Those plain review articles are way too limited for you to have a firm decision.

If you want to gain credible advices from experienced people in the web hosting industry, then there are no other good places than web hosting forums. There you can ask almost anything and get relevant answers from different people.

Even the people from hosting companies participate in forums to share their hosting experience, offer hosting solutions, and market their respective hosting plans and services.

Here is the list of the top three most useful web hosting forums that you can find on the Web. I strongly recommend that you register an account to all of them (yes, ALL) and participate with the hosting discussions. Do you know other great web hosting forums? Leave the links at the comments.

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Bloggers commonly have two sources of significant income: money earned from the sponsored advertisements of affiliate programs, and the income coming from paid reviews. Signing up for an affiliate program is much easier to do than registering for programs that pays for every review post you make. Affiliate programs only require you to have a running website – that is why it’s the easiest thing to do if you want to monetize your new blog site.

Paid review programs usually require a certain reputation, PageRank (PR) level of a blog and number of existing blog posts, before an applicant is accepted to the program. Rumors about Google penalizing blog sites who participate in paid reviews, which in their view is a way of building links “artificially”, also discourages new bloggers to get involved to the said program. However, doing paid reviews still and yet the biggest income source of popular bloggers like John Chow.

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We saw last year how intense the search engine battle was. Big companies like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google spent billions of dollars in efforts to gain market dominance in their online advertising business. At the end of the year, we saw that Google reigned supreme, with Yahoo, Microsoft, and other competitors closely trailing behind. Proofs were evident of Google’s victory: they acquired 17 innovating companies to call their own and with hopes to extend or penetrate further the online marketplace. If you don’t care, bloggers do – and they predict outright that Google’s glory will begin to fade in 2008.

Last year and until now, Google actively wipes out the PageRank (PR) of many blogs and websites they believed to have involved to link farms and other schemes designed to “artificially” inflate PageRank. PageRank is Google’s view on how important a web page is, thus favoring more important pages in their top Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Many observations reveal in totality that most penalized sites are those who joined networks offering paid reviews or links. For bloggers, PageRank is significant because many ad network companies (major source of blog revenues), begin to follow Google’s standards. Higher PRs somehow contribute to the continuous existence of most blog sites in the Internet.

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