[kaffe-siteadmin] Google PageRank

[Jim Pick]

Hi,

A friend mentioned to me that the kaffe.org website had a pretty high
PageRank score with Google.  So I dual-booted back into Windows,
installed the Google toolbar into Internet Explorer, and confirmed that
we've got a PageRank of 7 (out of 10) -- on a logarithmic scale.

That seems to be pretty high on the scale -- I was surprised to find a
lot of other popular sites I look at daily didn't score any higher, even
though they probably get 100x more traffic.  It does seem to be pretty
common for other free software sites to have very high PageRank scores
as well.   I imagine that's because people tend to link to them
permanently. 

Some more information on how PageRank is calculated can be found here:

  http://www.google.com/search?q=pagerank

Anyways, this does sort of explain some of the sponsorship offers we've
been getting -- because of the way PageRank is calculated, and the way
the site is laid out, a single link from our homepage to an online
retailer probably does give them a slight boost in their PageRank score,
which might be significant if most of their business comes from people
performing Google searches.

I was initially expecting sponsorship offers only from people who had a
more direct interest in Kaffe itself, so I did find these seemingly
"random" offers of sponsorship somewhat puzzling.

All-in-all, I think accepting sponsorships from "search engine
optimization" people is fine (as long as they aren't scam artists).

What I take away from it is that this type of sponsorship program might
actually be sustainable.  Other free software projects could also choose
to trade on the fact that they have a high PageRank score if they want
some help covering their basic costs.

Cheers,

 - Jim