Social media is hot today. There is no internet-savvy person who is oblivious on what social media means. When we hear the word social media, what words do we instantly associate with it? Do you think of social networking websites such as MySpace or Facebook? How about social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon? And who can forget about the status-updating and microblogging website called Twitter? All of them may be designed differently as well as serve different functions but they all have a common element for them to be regarded as a group.

Social media pertains to websites which has a community of people that shares information through the website. In this situation, the website acts as the medium to get the message across. That is why it is called social “media”.

With this in mind, social media have been utilized by people for various reasons. Mostly, it is used for businesses for it offers a targeted community which you can easily reach out to through messaging. Others have used it for its sheer power of promotion. There is a part of the community, however, that is called as social media addicts. These are people who stay at that particular website for the whole day and concentrate their promotion there.

This behavior is good and bad. It is good because it allows a user to penetrate the culture of a particular social media website in the beginning. This way, he can easily talk to its users regarding their needs. On the other hand, it is also bad. As Kristy Bolsinger said in her article entitled “Are All Your Eggs in One Social Media Basket?“, focusing all your time on one social media website alone will not help you as that website falls down in the future.

Well, we have seen social media sites rise and fall. There are some websites that have consistent traffic and revenue but there are also others which has a decreasing popularity as time passes by. What you need to do is to prevent facing problems in the future and spread your marketing scheme all throughout different websites.

Of course, this does not mean that you have to join every social media website you encounter. Managing 4-7 accounts will do. Besides, you will just create confusion for yourself by joining too many sites.

There is nothing wrong with being a social media fanatic. Participating in social media websites must be done with strategy and care.

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There is this discussion in Webmaster World about the recent change in PR among websites. The funny thing about it is that it is not simply because of the lowered rankings of the links. In fact, the site had boosted up in rankings without links. The question that the users of Webmaster World are debating on is “How can such a phenomenon happen?”

Through the concepts of search engine optimization, we have always believed that backlinks have a lot to do with the site’s rankings. This means the more websites linking to your website, the more PR it gains. PR is very important. If you do not know what PR is, it is an acronym for page rank which is a grade given by Google to a website after it has considered several factors such as content, authority and of course, links. That is the reason why webmasters are so keen on gaining page rank in a short period of time.

However, recent news has revealed that links are not contributing to page rank anymore. This is surprising especially for SEOs who have relied in offpage optimization to gain rankings. As a Webmaster World user points out a website that gained rankings despite the absence of backlinks, he showed confusion and the yearning to find out what is happening.

It seems that Google is experimenting on something on their algorithms. Matt Cutts made a statement about “mom and pop” sites getting a boost in the Google rankings. The users of Webmaster World pertained to this theory as they try to figure out how the page’s PR has increased despite the absence of backlinks.

Does this mean that backlinks are slowly turning to be useless? We hope not. Link building has always been known to work with double purpose, promoting the website and building search engine ranking. Removing this advantage may lead to a harder internet game for webmasters.

As of now, we have no idea how this happened. As suggested by one of the Webmaster World users, it is possible that PR has increased if the website linking to it has its PR increased. But it will still not explain how one website had gained ranking with only one link to a PR0 LinkedIn account.

I guess this is one of the recent mysteries on the internet world. It may take some time to figure out what is happening but once webmasters arrive at the answer, then there is no turning back. Whatever happens, these webmasters will try to figure out one algorithm after another until they arrive at the secret of the trick. No need to be discouraged.

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