Google Makes NO Bloody Sense

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I just don’t get Google’s thinking: First they tell you ‘use nofollow’ then they discount thousands of links for any of a hundred reasons even when they are legitimate votes. It seems that they are really trying to count only the votes they want to count, and not a single one more.

The trouble is: their definitions vary over time; and I really don’t get it. Yet there are dozens of searches I know of where the results aren’t useful at all, especially name searches which bring up dozens of irrelevant directories, etc…

According to Yahoo Site explorer, one of my sites has over 5000 inlinks, and yet Google only counts 2 links. 2 out of over 5000 links. The whole linking game for PR makes less and less sense over time, to me and to my searches.

Why? Why? Could it be that the Google machine is producing good results, but that the PR system is seriously broken.

Here is my rational: the whole link economy runs into billions of links, but if you discount 95% of them (in my case over 99%), then it follows that Google’s system is systematically becoming less democratic (was it ever?), less tolerant, and much more elitist than ever.

An example: John Chow’s site has 2,380 links in Google currently, but when you turn to Yahoo Site explorer (counting exclusive links), you will see over 230,000 links. In other words, even for John’s site, 98.94% of the links are discounted.

What this means is that once you lose 99% of the non-countable links, each link is somehow worth magically more PR points because the remaining links are considered elitist compared to the rest of the links thus junked. Doesn’t this exacerbate the link buying phenomenon even more?

Cash vs. Credit Cards: Cash is nearly always better value for customers

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InvestorBlogger says in response to a post on Bargaineering about Credit Cards vs. Cash.

We run a business here in Taiwan, and we specifically don’t take credit cards in any form. Why? Our best prices are for cash purchases, and that’s what we give our customers.

While we may win a few extra dollars from additional transactions, having that extra middleman just isn’t worth the hassle of letting someone else look after our money.

With installation fees, monthly terminal fees, fees on each transaction, and numerous penalty fees that may apply, plus the risk of the credit card company NOT paying up promptly due to chargebacks, we could actually end up out of pocket for transactions that, cash-wise, would already have been ‘settled’.

The upshot is that, for the foreseeable future, we are not likely to take credit cards, in any shape or form. If we were to, we’d likely have to increase our prices for ALL of our customers by at least 5% to cover most costs. This is not an unusual choice in many more cash-based economies, such as Taiwan’s but in the UK/USA it would be quite an unusual position for a retailer to take.

I really don’t understand why consumers think credit card spending is better. It’s not. It’s not better for you, it’s not better for me. And it’s not generally better for society. Do you know any businesses that specifically reject credit cards for purchases of goods and services? What reasons did they give?

Steve’s sites for Affiliate Marketing

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Over the past few months, my friend Steve Sutherland has been encouraging me with the whole affiliate marketing thing. I’d just like to share with readers some keysites he’s suggested me to try including…

These are the ones I’ve been using for my research… I’m sure there are dozens more that I should be reading, but am not. Suggestions?