The WISIWYG Blog

A long, long time ago, in a blog seldom visited by anybody but me (or so I thought), a girl named Geek posted on its chat box, congratulating the blog owner for reaching PR4. Had it been any other person, the blog owner would have jumped for joy and treated his friends and officemates at Dad's, Saisaki, Kamayan for an eat-all-you can dinner. Sadly, the name of the blog owner is Amiel (which is synonymous to kuripot). And one more thing, he does not know what PR4 means!

Then, one day...

Tama na! Hindi ko kayang panindigan yung fairy tale style of writing!

Anyway, all I am going to talk about in this post is the PR4 rank of this blog. Hehe. Well, I was once proud of it, thinking that rank 0 is the lowest and rank 5 is the highest. I thought my blog was ranking well, only to discover later that the highest is 10 and mine has not even reached the halfway mark!

But what is a PR ranking, and why is it so important that I'm so willing to dedicate a space for it here in my blog? Actually, the ranking is not so important to me. All it gives me is the chance to tease my friends because mine is higher than their blog's PR. Hehe. But the ranking seems important for those who are blogging for cash. Maybe, they use it as a gauge to know how popular their blog or website is.

PR stands for PageRank. And according to Wikipedia, it is a link analysis algorithm for measuring the relative importance of an element within a set. If that definition is too mathematical for you, allow me to try to explain it in a much easier way in the next paragraphs. But if you want to discover what kind of algorithm it is and how it is computed, you're welcome to search for it on Wikipedia. Your author here is not that good mathematically to understand all those notations posted on the site.

So, how does Google PageRank work for simple bloggers like you and me? According to the same Wikipedia page that I have been talking about, PageRank rates your site based on links. I don't know how it works exactly, but the number of links to your site makes your rank higher. Not only that, it also "weighs" the site that links to your site. If the site that links to yours is ranked as "important", then the value of the link also becomes higher.

So how did I get a PR4 while some of my blogger friends are cursing Google for getting a zero? I really don't know. Probably because of my friends' sites that have better rankings. Or maybe because of the links from Technorati, or from Blogspirit each time I update this blog. Or probably because I'm just plain good at this thing. Haha. Pakibasa naman hanggang matapos... huwag na mainis or magalit.

Is a higher PageRank important for your site? I really don't know. But just like a medal that you can display on your blog or website, it's better if you can have a rank that you can be proud of. It probably is important for people taking blogging seriously or as a source of income. But for this blog that contains nothing but rants and blabbing, it probably won't mean much. But I am still displaying it on my sidebar. It looks good, if you'll ask me. And should it drop down to a zero ranking later, I can just delete it :p