If you have a WordPress powered blog and if you dig your Spam Comment folder like I have to, you would probably have received numerous “comments” about a website called “Proposal To Mary”. I am not going to link to the site in case somebody mistaken it as a paid link. Perhaps you could Google it if you are interested but I am not sure if it is indexed yet because it is new without much content.

Anyway, this website was set up by a German man who met his girlfriend “Mary” during a holiday. From what I understand, he has now moved to America to be with her and he wants to propose to her but does not want to do it directly.

What he wants to do is to ask internet users to help him spam spread the word to as many people as possible hoping that it will reach “Mary”.

We don’t know the real name of “Mary” because he would like to protect her privacy PLUS if her name is disclosed then someone who knows her would straightaway email the proposal to her and the game would be over.

I think that this is a very romantic gesture BUT what happens if the proposal does not ever reach her? The internet could be too huge or it could be very small. Just like in real life, if you want to find somebody, you never can but you will keep bumping into people whom you would like to avoid!

Trusted Places is a social website where people hang out. My cousin, Jasmine, told me that when she first moved to London, a colleague told her that this is the place to check out if she would like to get the most out of her money.

On Trusted Places, real people share and rate their favorite London bars and pubs, restaurants and other places that people go to eat, drink and hang out, places to shop or catch a show and just about anything that a community member feels worthy of a mention either in a positive or negative light. With such information readily available online, locals would know which places to frequent and which to avoid.

Jasmine told me that based on these user reviews, she now only frequent places that come with high rating from members of Trusted Places. I think this is a wonderful concept as it pushes commercial places to offer only the best services or lose the business!

Since the Google Page Rank earlier this month when most websites and blogs have been demoted, including my own blog, I noticed that many bloggers have been evaluating where they have “gone wrong” to deserve a lower ranking. Some people I know have lost one rank but some got it worse by losing THREE rankings.

Now, what I see is that many such affect bloggers have started to remove things from their blogs that they deemed have caused this demotion like leaking of link juice from blog rolls and such.

By doing so, they are causing a domino effect on the rest of the blogs that they have been linking to, most of them reciprocal links.

Can you imagine that if I remove the list of blogs on my sidebar, I would be turning these into ONE SIDED link to my site when it was a reciprocal link. This mean that my own blog would have an advantage over other blogs in the next Google Page Rank update when those who are still linking to me would have lost a link to their site (from me because I removed them).

I think that if Google has demoted your site, there is no need to punish all the innocent people that have been sharing their link juice with you. And yes, I noticed that some bloggers have already removed ME from their blog roll. This would cause my link weight to drop.

Let’s see what I should do… HHMMMmm