What is the PageRank of my site?

Pagerank, a Google trademark, is related to the number of links to your site from other sites and is one of the factors determining your site's position on search engines. Ranking is between 0 and 10. This site has a ranking of 2, which means hardly anyone has linked to it & virtually no-one reads it, so you'd better rush away & read higher ranked sites like everyone else. After you've checked your pagerank, that is.

Check Page Rank of any web site pages instantly:

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How can I add a map with Google Page Creator?

Maybe I'm no longer a complete novice! Can you believe I actually put a map on my Melbourne Advice blog last week? I chanced on a discussion group where people were spending pages describing the locations of Melbourne's University campuses and thought what they really needed was a good map. The problem was how to do it.

There's a google widget you can use to add a map to your webpage, but it wouldn't let me mark any of the campuses. I looked at the Google Maps API page & couldn't make any sense of it. In desperation I created a map on google's new mymap feature, and put a link on my blog. To be honest, I wasn't satisfied though, because the link isn't very obvious. In the end I found detailed instructions on Beta Blogger For Dummies. It took about ten hours to find the appropriate instructions, put the CSS and HTML code into my template, shift it around the blog page & sort out how to link to the map I'd created in mymap, which is where Google Page Creator came in.

I found out pretty early in this whole blogging experience that there are some things which Blogger just can't do. One of the more annoying things is that it can't host a file online. Google Page Creator appeared a few months ago and promptly disappeared into oblivion. Personally I couldn't really see the point of it. No pretty templates, no widgets, no nothing. But hidden in the link function is the ability to upload a file (say my map's data file) and host it online. I can call on the file from blogger, link to it. People can download it. I've called on a map file from within my blogger template to display the map using the new GGeoXml constructor. Building on the code from Beta Blogger For Dummies, I put the line
var geoXml = new GGeoXml("http://myaccount.googlepages.com/mymap.kml")
after the line
var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map")) and now the map I made in Google's mymap facility is now visible on my site!

Watch this space for more uses for Page Creator, but in the meantime, you can see from the map on melbournepricecheck.blogspot.com why there was so much confusion about campus locations.

How do I get my users to rate my posts?

I'd like to set up a rating system so the jokes on jokevault.blogspot.com can be rated by my readers. I'd like a new reader to be able to go straight to the highlights & skip the bad jokes.

I found two options for blogger:

1. A star rating system which you have to add manually to each post on your blog at www.majikwidget.com . That's the one I've got on this post. Its great if you only have 25 posts or less to rate - its free - an you can put the widget on any post without changing your template.


2. Spotback have a widget which you can put in the template and the rating appears on all your posts. Its much less hassle than putting the code on every post & its free for any number of posts. I'm giving it a spin on jokevault.blogspot.com .

MyLot

MyLot - another way of not earning anything while spending hours & hours online.

Here's how it works:
1) Discussions:
You earn 1-3 cents by responding to a topic or starting a new topic.

2) Photos: You get 1 cent for loading a photo into a discussion topic.

3) Referrals: You'll collect 25% of their earnings. Boost my earnings & pay my electricity bill by joining from myLot User Profile!

No? Well I suppose I'll go back to MyLot to build up the 500 discussions, replies and photos I'll need to get a $10 Paypal payment. Probably.

A Voucher from Valued Opinions

Wow! I finally got a voucher from Valued Opinions! A real $20 voucher for Dymocks.

A response from Valued Opinions

I sent the following email to Valued Opinions on the 17th of March:

My vouchers, ordered in December have still not arrived. Because of the long delay and lack of response from Valued Opinions, I have publicized the issue on my blog http://notearningmoneyonline.blogspot.com . When I receive vouchers to the value of $20 (any valid vouchers) I will change my Blog entry to reflect the fact. Howver, if I am not paid, the entry will continue on my Blog un- edited and will tell not only your members but also your customers about the fact that you are not paying as promised.

Today (20th March) I received the following reply:

Hi

Thanks for your email. I have arranged a replacement voucher for you.

Kind Regards

Panel Support

Has anyone actually received vouchers from Valued Opinions?

Valued Opinions is an online survey company which offers $10 and $20 vouchers for doing market research surveys online, in your own time. I joined it last year, because I thought paid surveys would be a good way of making a little extra cash.

Back in November, I was looking forward to vouchers from Valued Opinions for my Christmas shopping. By December my balance was over $20 and I requested payment. When I hadn't received the vouchers by late January, I contacted Valued Opinions, who responded that they had a delay with my vouchers but they were now in the post. A couple of weeks ago I still hadn't received the vouchers and complained again. No response.

Do Valued Opinions actually put any value on our time or opinions?

Do all their vouchers get lost in the mail?

Links in a Blogger hack.

The Bizarre Jokester (WOW!) left the following comment on my post "More Martian Jokes":

You have taken the hack from my blog Amazingly Bizarre.

I'm really honoured about that.

However, I feel that it is extremely unfair of you to remove the complimentary link at the bottom, as I requested very clearly on the page where you copied the code that 'Please do not remove the link at the bottom'.

Now once again, i request to you to put that link back up, since you ought to give credit (where it is due) in the way the owner of the hack wants it.

Thanks!

:)

My reply:
I liked all the little icons, which formed a neat line across the bottom of each post. I didn't link the look of the link so much though. It was in a larger font and didn't fit in line. I do understand why you would like to have a link to your blog from everywhere your icons are used, to advertise your hack and bring in traffic. On the other hand I think my readers may be distracted by so many advertisements for your blog. I will remove the hack as you wish & reconsider how to use it on my blogs.

How do I increase traffic on my blog?

I've tried

• linking from community websites like Orkut. It increases traffic, but the links keep disappearing & I had renew them.
  
• increasing ranking on Technorati and other blog rating sites by getting links from other blogs
  
• getting placement on my own search engine (say a Swicki)

Well, here's a new one I've just installed on jokewarehouse.blogspot.com and yourfunnyvideos

• Give readers a prompt to rate your posts on social bookmarking sites like del.ic.ious. I've put in a blogger hack to put little icons at the bottom of each post. The method came from Amazinglybizarre.blogspot.com/new-blogger-hack
  

Links are good. Aren't they?

All this time I've been trying to improve my sites' ranking on the search engines by improving content and keywords. I've brought traffic to my sites by putting in links from online communities. Apparently I've missed the point completely.

The point is PageRank & I can't believe I never noticed it before. I stumbled across it today while reviewing "PayPerPost". "PayPerPost" pay for product placements and advertorial on blogs. Quality blogs. This blog isn't good enough. I don't post often enough.

One of the advertisers stipulated only sites with a PageRank of at least 2. "What's PageRank"? The question flashed through my head a microsecond before I typed PageRank into Google. I now know that PageRank is actually a Google trademark, based on the number and quality of links to a page from other webpages. Scrolling down the list of explanations, I chanced on Webworkshop which explained that search engines avoid abuse of the PageRank system by assigning a PageRank of 0/10 to any sites which have too many links - known as link farms. Links to penalised sites can penalise your PageRank.

Didn't I just link to one of those last week? And didn't people stop coming to my sites afterwards? It was one little link which did that? I went to the first PageRank checker I could find and checked the link farm. It has a PageRank of 0. Not much point getting links from there, its not going to increase my ranking. In fact I'm better off linking from here.