Benefits of listing in a directory

Listing your website in a directory provides an external link to your website. In the world wide web, this external link is viewed as a vote of confidence for your website. The more votes a website has (the more external links) the more the world wide web views such a website with authority and prominence.

In this context world wide web really means the search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search and Ask. These search engines have to come up with a method to rank websites in order of importance when a search is performed. The number of external links linking to a website is a significant contributor to the order of such rankings and so the more links the better.

Directories are often an excellent source of useful websites. http://www.find-uk-accountant.co.uk/ is a niche directory specific to UK accountants, whereas www.google.com/dirhp is Google's catalogue of websites on the Internet (based on the human edited directory DMOZ).

Directories are a key starting point both for humans and search engines in finding websites on the Internet.

The Sponsor This Company directory catalogues sponsors of our company.

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The Next Million Dollar Homepage

Million Dollar Homepage was a simple idea that caught the imagination. It was fundamentally an advertising play with an innovative angle in its unique presentation and domain name concept. The story behind the website added to the intrigue with the owner, Alex Tew, using his idea as a platform to pay his way through university.

It was a unique idea that will be difficult to top, so how can Sponsor This Company become the next million dollar homepage? To be honest it will be extremely difficult. Probably impossible. At the end of the day Million Dollar Homepage was a combination of a website and advertising. Any new concept that is based on a website and advertising will be compared to Million Dollar Homepage and will, more often than not, be found wanting. The fact that websites and advertising pretty much go hand in hand compounds the problem.

Sponsor This Company is a website which offers external websites an advertising platform. Utto...

The interesting story behind Sponsor This Company is a goal to raise funds to help build a sustainable Internet business. The platform to do this is fairly old hat, a directory structure to categorise the sponsors. However, as one or two sponsors start trickling in the fundraising concept has the potential to take on a new level.

Google Page Rank: The Currency of the Internet

Google Page Rank: The Currency of the Internet

Google has created an online currency, Google Page Rank (PR).

Google PR is the patented technology that Google uses to help rank websites in order of authority and quality. A website with high Google PR is deemed by Google to be a more reliable source of unique, content rich material than a website with a low PR. PR ranges from 0 to 10 with each step up proving increasingly difficult to achieve.

Google is the printing press of its online currency. It does not directly benefit from the market it has created. In fact it is opposed to websites trading PR and has publicly stated that the buying and selling of PR is against its program policies. If you flaunt Google's program policies you run the risk of being nuked and dropped entirely from Google's search results.

What is Buying and Selling PR? Website 'LoPR' has a PR of 2 and wants a better PR rating. Website 'HiPR' has a high PR of 7 and wants to cash in. HiPR sell its PR by linking to the LoPR website in exchange for $$$. Linking from one website to another passes on Page Rank. LoPR subsequently becomes MedPR.

PR effectively makes Internet advertising quantifiable. A correlation would naturally exist between advertising potential and quality of advertising platform. i.e. the higher the quality website (higher PR) the greater advertising potential and the higher price paid for that advertising spot. As PR quantifies Google's perception of the quality of a website, it is no surprise that PR has become a tradable commodity.

All the above begs the question, "Why did Google ever reveal the PR of websites?". The whole issue of buying and selling PR could have been avoided it PR was not a visible quantity. The PR of any website can be viewed in the Google toolbar.

The primary purpose of Sponsor This Company is to raise funds for our start up IT company. The one service our website will always be able to offer is advertising. Our fundraising concept was therefore to provide companies with an advertising outlet via our online directory to offer some incentive to sponsoring an unknown entity.

Indexed in search engines and Google PR

It has been several months since the website was established back in August 2007 and in all that time little has happened bar the tumbleweed passing by.

Herein lies the crux of the problem. Until a website is indexed in the search engines (in particular Google) then a website really has little contribution as a marketing tool. It is very difficult to promote a website that according to the search engines does not exist or has a very low profile.

Indexing is the process by which a search engine basically finds and catalogues a website. Yahoo! and Google search the web for websites and when new web pages are found the search engines say "let's include all these new pages in our search results." Sponsor This Company now has 62 pages indexed in Google http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Asponsorthiscompany.com

New websites take longer to index as they are not supported by inbound links. An inbound link is a link from an external website. In simple terms it is a vote of confidence that one website gives to another. The more votes a website has the more authority it has. Therefore the more links the better placed the website will be in search results.

Getting indexed is only part of the problem. Visible Google Page Rank (PR) is the currency of the Internet and without it you are bankrupt. Google's search ranking algorithm ranks web pages from 0 to 10 with 10 being the best. The scale is logarithmic which means it gets increasingly difficult to move up 1PR value. This culminates in a PR10 being an extremely rare occurrence.

Some key drawbacks of a new website relating to Google PR are
- The PR of a website influences decisions to exchange links
- PR is updated irregularly
- Due to a Google 'sandbox' effect it can take several months before PR is initially assigned to a website

Consequently Sponsor This Company has taken several months to show a PR value, which now stands at 2.