About 3mutts.com

    I have two reasons for putting together a website like this. Both reasons represent a significant departure from the type of website I would "normally" make, or websites I have made in the past, all of which were built to sell a product or provide a platform for somebody else to sell a product. This is, well, this is something else entirely. It is both a test and an online dumping ground where I can stash bits and pieces of myself in digital format. It's not a blog. It's not an online diary. It's not a web journal. It's just a collection of different "stuff" and, where appropriate, my comments and observations about that stuff. The stuff that's being displayed is picked at random, selected only because of it's proximity to me and my familiarity with the subject matter. I made a page about a Poulan chainsaw, for instance. That's because I happen to have a Poulan chainsaw. Keeps research time to a minimum.

    The test is a test to see how long it takes certain keywords and keyword phrases to start showing up in the major search engines (read: Google), how well those keywords rank in comparison to other sites that may have similar pages on similar subjects, and about a dozen other things along those same lines. It is not a scientific test by any stretch of the imagination. There are too many intangibles and variables that I can't even define, much less document, for this to be any sort of scientific test. I'm just going to observe. I'm going to observe and I'm going to take lots of notes and at some point I'm going to make a determination as to whether or not it's worth continuing.

    I don't fully understand how the major search engines operate. No one fully does except the search engines themselves. The mystery and secrecy surrounding inner search engine workings is intentionally created and routinely maintained by those search engines. They don't want anyone to know how they do things. This is technology worth billions of dollars so their proprietary paranoia is understandable. Much is supposed and much is believed. Even more is suspected. We believe certain things about search engines largely on faith, because other people believe the same things, or even because we've seen evidence of those things ourselves. All other things being equal and given identical content, a website that is four years old will rank higher with regard to certain keywords than a site that's only three years old. Setting aside the potential for a duplicate content penalty, we know that the age of a website is given a certain amount of weight when it comes to assigning rank in search standings. We know this because we've seen it and because so far it hasn't been disproven. We know that if two sites are exactly the same age and contain the same content, the site with the most inbound links will rank higher for the same keywords than the site with the fewest. We know this not because the search engines tell us, but moreso because we see evidence of it everywhere online.

    There are a few things I know about this test that aren't guesswork. I know the number of sites linking to 3mutts.com. I know the age of those websites, their Page Rank, their Alexa ranking, the specific niche they inhabit on the internet, etc... The access I'm giving the search engines to crawl and index these pages is a strict control. As much as anything else, you could call it a test of the power of my little network; an assessment of the value of one-way links originating from that network. I already have a pretty good idea of what that value is with respect to my own little area of the web. I sell widgets, for instance. The value of links from websites selling widgets is mainly to other widget selling sites. My sites get more value from links with other widget sites than they would from sites selling, say, gizmos. A link from a gizmo site is still worth something and shouldn't be

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