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BBCNews: Skype makes money because a small fraction of users is buying additional services, such as the capability to call from Skype to the telephone network or vice versa.

Not having to make money from every user is not a new idea, Zennström emphasises.

“It is very similar to companies like Google and other internet companies. When you go and search on Google you don’t pay for that. But sometimes you click on an advert and Google makes money on that.

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This passage outlines an important point about Internet businesses that provide free services; you don’t have to monetise your entire audience to make a profit. If you have an innovative technology that will garner massive mainstream penetration then all you need is a small percentage of your audience to make a purchase to reap significant returns.

I don’t think it’s the death of the free Internet quite yet.

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Although the Google Toolbar currently does not show PageRank I feel confident in saying that PageRank is still playing it’s important role in the Google Search Engine ranking process. You probably know that the higher your PageRank the better because it means your site will appear before other sites with lower PageRank that are competing for your key terms. In order to get a high PageRank you must have other sites, preferably also with high PageRank, linking to your site. Hence webmasters actively chase link exchanges with other sites.

Generally when you do a link exchange your main website front page is the page that is linked to. It is that page which receives the highest PageRank and consequently distributes ranking to the sub-pages within your site. This is important to remember since ideally you want Google to index your entire website so all your pages will be showing up in search results. Of course if your sub-pages also have high PageRank then they will be appearing higher in search results as well.

So how exactly does it work when you build your website using subdomains rather than directories?

When I refer to a subdomain I mean something like this - http://toolbar.google.com. The Google Toolbar has it’s own house on Google.com. On the web hosting side of things subdomains can be completely separate from the main hosting with it’s own FTP and directory structure and/or can be simply a mapped folder/directory under the main directory. For the purposes of this article I am going to explain what happened when I divided my site into subdomains which were hosted under the one FTP account, however they were proper subdomains, not mapped redirects.

Back before PageRank was widely promoted and sought after I was busy working on the navigation of my business website, BetterEdit.com . I wasn’t thinking about the search engine optimisation (SEO) implications of my site, I just wanted my site to be easy to navigate and maintain.

Using subdomains: A case study at BetterEdit.com

BetterEdit in essence is two different websites, one for student proofreading and one for business proofreading (At one stage there was a third section for manuscript/book editing but I later decided to keep things as simple as possible and stored manuscript proofreading under the business section.)

Initially I kept all sections under the one domain, BetterEdit.com and used a directory for each. So it was /business and /student and all the corresponding sub-pages under these. I later learned about the subdomain options available on my webhost and thought that might be a good way to divide the two sections so I went about setting up the subdomains and transferred the content. From that point on the only page that was on the main domain was the first index page where users choose between the student or the business options and taken to the appropriate subdomain. This is the current system in place that you can see when you visit www.BetterEdit.com.

Tip: When I divided my site into subdomains I kept the pages in the original domain directories (/student and /business) on the server even though I had migrated the content from these pages to the subdomains and my navigation system no longer pointed to the main pages, only the subdomains. However because Google, other search engines and websites had indexed and/or linked to my main site sub-pages I didn’t want to delete them. Instead I used a meta refresh on all these pages to direct users back to the front page where they would navigate into the live site.

You can see this in action by trying to access one of the old pages like: www.betteredit.com/services.shtml

Eventually I became caught up in PageRank just like all the other webmasters out there. I investigated how Google treated subdomains and what was likely to happen to my site during the next Google dance (PageRank update). I learnt that Google treats subdomains as separate websites altogether. At that time my main index site had maintained a PageRank 4 and of course the subdomains were yet to have any visible PageRank because they had not existed during the last Google dance.

During the next update my main index dropped to a PageRank 3 and the subdomains were also ranked at 3. I was not too pleased at that point and determined that because I had changed the structure of my site the PageRank 4 had which I had on the main .com site had been divided to the three sites I had with the structure - two subdomains and one main .com. If you think about it there were no sites at all linking to my new subdomains except my one index page, so I should have been reasonably happy with a PageRanking of 3.

I wasn’t too worried about my drop in PageRank because I figured as Google indexed my new subdomains and I continued to add new content that my rankings would improve. During the next Google dance I was pleasantly surprised to have my main .com return to a PageRank 4 and my new subdomains also jump to a PageRank 4. Also, because my subdomains and index page were inter-linking sub-pages across all three sites many of my sub-pages had managed to go up to a PageRank 4 as well. In a directory structure they would probably have always remained one less than the root index unless I had some solid incoming links from other sites pointing directly to them, which is not likely since most incoming links always point to the root domain.

Although my case is far from conclusive it does illustrate a possible outcome from using subdomains. You may experience an initial drop in ranking when you first create the new subdomains but provided you stick by the hard SEO rule that fresh content is good and you work on making your subdomains unique and full of keyword rich copy then you may end up with three websites with high rankings instead of just one, which is certainly worth the time.

Yaro Starak
Webmaster

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Media Guerrilla: The way I see it, most marketers (and PR folk for that matter) are used to dealing with dozens of markets of millions verses millions of markets of dozens. Meaning they’re used to going where they can get the biggest bang for the buck. In the broadcast world it’s CNN. In the print media world it’s the WSJ. In the online world it’s Boing Boing. You get the picture. It’s not Joe Blog.

The concept of a “trusted network” isn’t on a page in the marketer’s playbook right now. When it comes to online programs, I think too many companies are too focused on getting the A-list blogs to write two sentences about an announcement, while ignoring the C-list blogs that are writing two pages about the same thing.

So, while Joe Blog on the C-list may lack the reach of his blogger brethren, he still has a degree of influence on those folks who read his stuff. Even if it’s only 5 people, those 5 people follow Joe Blog because they either know him, like what he writes or they share a common interest. Regardless, there’s a level of trust in Joe. And influence is a very powerful byproduct of trust.

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As a test I wonder what would produce better results - pay $500 to an A-List blogger to hit his audience up with an advertisement, or pay $50 to 10 C-List bloggers? As you become more and more popular and consequently more and more mainstream, is the influence of a blogger’s opinion reduced?

Think about radio personalities - do you trust the word of the biggest stars or the smaller niche focused showhosts that appear more like your next door neighbour than a celebrity?

The same question can be applied to podcast hosts. If I recommend a piece of software chances are you are going to trust what I say because you believe I’ve tested it myself and found it to be a good program. However if my popularity skyrockets, I become more and more commercial, perhaps with staff and paid advertisers do you value my opinion any less?

Yaro

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Over at Ross Mayfield’s blog there is a great post including a podcast interview with three people that are heavily involved with cutting edge Internet technologies. In particular it talks about the excitement surrounding Wikis, Weblogs and RSS and how they are impacting business.

In particular I appreciated the point in this interview that while the technology behind these initiatives is not that revolutionary, it’s the changing perceptions and they way users are utlising the technologies that is having the impact and creating excitement. Blogs and Wikis certainly are not complicated tools, but the mainstream adoption and powerful ways they are allowing people to collaborate together (think wikipedia) are fueling the revolution.

See if you can spot the academic in the interview

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This may be years old news for some of you but I only just had it brought to my attention by Max from Yabbyland. I’m currently reading a book all about Google and Internet search so I found this article quite convincing…for about 10 seconds.

Google: As a Google user, you’re familiar with the speed and accuracy of a Google search. How exactly does Google manage to find the right results for every query as quickly as it does? The heart of Google’s search technology is PigeonRankâ„¢, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

PigeonRank’s success relies primarily on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and its unique capacity to recognize objects regardless of spatial orientation. The common gray pigeon can easily distinguish among items displaying only the minutest differences, an ability that enables it to select relevant web sites from among thousands of similar pages.

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