All Forum Posts by: Toby Munk

It can be confusing but it really is simple. Maybe I am just not that good at explaining.

Look at it this way. A link is a vote. But not all votes are equal, some are more important than others. Now the question is what makes a site more important such that its links are more important?

Well that in turn depends on the links it receives. Think about how many people link to CNN. That makes the site important. So when you get a link from CNN google passes some of that importance to your site. Once your site is more important then all the links from your site to other sites also become more important.

You can see that everything is always in a state of flux. But after a few iteration through all the websites the PR numbers actually become quite stable.

Hope this helps

Toby

PR as you know stands for Page Rank. The google method for calculating the importance of a page.

The PR scale is logarithmic. No one knows what the log is but lets say it is 10. They a site with PR3 would be 10 times as important than PR2 etc..

The PR is a patented formula based on inbound links. Basically the more links the more votes for a site/page. The more important the site of the link the more the link is worth. The fewer the links on a page the more the individual links are worth.

One can see that it is necessary to go through the calculation a few times. It is like a never ending circle of calculations to get to PR. One link influences the PR of a site which in turn influences the PR on the next site and so forth.

OK I am no bank analysts. But simple math tells me this:

Lets say all of the Citi mortgages (all $50b) were done at the peak of the housing market at 90% LTV. Then if the market is down 10% they would break even. At 20% down they would be $5b in the hole. At 30% down they would loose $10b

This is if all the mortgages were to default. Ok there are transaction costs etc... not take into account here.

The market is NOT down 30% (yet). Not all mortgages were done at the top of the market. Not all high LTV loans will go into foreclosure.

Makes me wonder how they come up with these numbers?

Just want to be clear, as I do not want the issue to confuse people. Not criticizing you just clarifying.

A page that includes a "nofollow" tag WILL be indexed by the search engines.

What the tag will do is tell the search engine not to follow a link. Kind of what the tag says ;-)

So the link will not be included in google's page rank calculation. For example you can have a link to your site from the CNN home page, it will get you lots of traffic but it will not get your site any higher in the search results.

Anne,

start out with having a signature here on BP, link that to your website.
I will try to answer a few of your questions.

Domain forwarding will get the user to your ultimate site, but will not do anything for you in terms of SEO. I would have separate sites if the topics are too diverse. If the topics do not have any synergies and somebody that is coming to look for one thing is completely not interested in the rest then do different domains.

That is considered at "black hat" strategy. Google knows and sees what you are doing, they can read your HTML. In the worst case you will be banned. This is NOT a good strategy at all.

Search engine submittal is a waste of time. Google, Yahoo, MSN and you have 98% covered. This is unless you are in a niche market where a niche search engine exists.

Link exchange is not as important as it used to be. Two way links are better than no links but one way links are king.

Read a good SEO book, it will help you a great deal in understanding what people will do if you decide to hire out the SEO effort.

I think it is essential to have one's blog on one's website. From an SEO standpoint an external blog does almost nothing other than potentially offer some back-links.

So moving the blog to an external site might work well for people that do not have a website or do not need/want to improve their organic search rankings.

But in my case that is a large portion of why I have a blog.

Jes4,

I have better things to do than define terms for you. Call it what you want.
If you want to be picky about the term "Recession" go ahead.

I much rather be productive and look at the world as it unfolds.

Whether it is called a rescission or not is beside the point. Who cares what the definition of a recession is. You can see the effects of whatever it is in the slaughter that is going on in large parts of the housing market.

Yup, will post a job on there. My past experience was not great with the people in India, but the blog implementation should be much easier.

Thanks for reminding me of elance. Had almost forgotten about it.

I am curious, what is the difference between a contemporary and a modern home?