A friend of mine sent me this email:

Help!! I just exchanged links with a guy and he has asked the following:

Many thanks for the link. But I have a request,please shift my link to the page having at least PR-2 i.e please shift my link to this page [redacted]

What on earth is a PR-2? Queenie

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but people think I do. Here's what I replied:

Google "Page Rank."

The guy wants a link from your higher ranked front page rather than your unranked link page (which I seem not to be on, I notice).

The theory is that his page will be ranked higher in Google's Page Rank if the link comes from a page with a higher number. Fer instance, my events blog has a page rank of 3. By me linking to you, that theoretically boosts your page rank. The corollary to that theory is that links from an unranked page reduces the page rank of the page that is linked to.

To put it another way: If you hang around with the popular kids, you are popular. But if you hang around with the nerds, well, you aren't.

I don't put much stock in it, myself. Google periodically adjusts its page rank system. I used to have a page rank of 4. Then they did something and I went down to 3. GHS has a page rank of 4 on the front page. None of the property pages rank at all.

Another ranking system is Alexa. GHS has an Alexa rating of 665,005. You are unranked there. My events blog is ranked 14. What does that mean? Beats the shit out of me.

Your response should be "I have removed you from the links page. Cheers!" or "All outgoing links go on the 'Links' page." He doesn't dictate your website design.

Have another question with a longwinded answer?

Does anyone have any insight into the whys and wherefores of Google Page Rank?

Last week, I got an email from Google AdSense that, essentially, told me to quit using a third party to fraudulently click my own ads. I responded that I don't do that, and asked what page was being abused so I could voluntarily remove the ads. Google wrote back and said that they couldn't tell me which page was being abused because it would reveal how they know that I was doing it, and yes, they knew it was me. The click fraud was tracked to my account. I answered back and repeated that I wasn't doing it, and asked if there were ways I could prevent fraudulent clicks. Again I was told they couldn't tell me that, because then people would know how they look for fraudulent clicks. And I should stop using a third party program to click my own ads.

So I removed the ads on all my sites. I replaced them with Amazon ads, but the revenue just isn't the same, not that I was burning up the world with AdSense, mind you. I wrote Google back and reported that someone has access to my account, and that until they gave me the "go ahead" and let me know they caught the culprit, I would voluntarily stop running their ads, because I, too, take click fraud seriously.