Google is currently in the process of updating page rank and depending on whether they go up, go down or maintain the same page rank as before the update, millions of webmasters will be affected in one way or another by Google over the next few days. We, for example, started the morning with a modest page rank of 4 which we’ve held for a good while now, and at some point during the day we noticed that our page rank had been dropped to 3. Our site is pretty small and relatively obscure, so you’d think we wouldn’t be much affected by the drop in page rank. But even a small, obscure website like ours suffers a loss when a Google update results in a lowered page rank, because Google is considered to be the begin and the end, the alpha and the omega of the Internet.

In an October 2002 piece by Stefanie Olsen for CNET news.com, Danny Sullivan of searchenginewatch.com is quoted as saying, “So many people are dependent on Google’s free editorial traffic that it’s like food out of their mouths to lose ranking.”

The majority of the little traffic we receive daily comes from Google, and if indeed a drop in page rank results in lower placement in search results, then we will be seeing a reduction in the little traffic we’ve been managing to get.

Unfortunately, a website like ours depends on selling advertising in order to generate income; but advertisers have no interest in advertising on properties with a low page rank. A low page rank tells an advertiser that, in the eyes of Google, a website is pretty useless. Admittedly there are other statistics that advertisers consider in addition to your Google page rank. Alexa ranking for example is used by most advertising programs and a site can have no page rank but a good Alexa ranking and still be considered worth spending money on for advertising. But more often than not, a site with a low Google page rank will also have a low Alexa rank unless that site has other means for getting traffic.

Granted Google doesn’t just arbitrarily drop your site’s ranking. At least you want to believe. But Google is hardly considerate when it comes to the plights of website owners who are unable to get well-ranked websites to link to them, and with Google putting so much emphasis and importance on link popularity, it often doesn’t matter whether or not you have quality content. Your worth comes down to a measurement of who your friends are so to speak. If you don’t have a few “rich” friends, as in friends with a page rank of 5 and higher, you’re worth nothing as far as Google is concerned.

With page rank being one of the primary decision makers for advertisers, Alexa rank also playing an important role, website owners who can’t charm their way onto the blog rolls of sites held in high esteem by Google, are forced to try to buy friends, and Google doesn’t like it when you try to buy friends. Google makes every effort to find and punish those who resort to desperate tactics to try to get their page rank higher. They argue that if your site is worth anything it will somehow find its way into the in crowd without you having to resort to tricks; but if you’re at the bottom of their pile and you don’t have money to afford to pay for advertising your website, it can be difficult to get visitors to your site to begin with. With Google being the God of search engines, if people aren’t finding you in Google, people aren’t finding you unless you can afford to advertise. It’s almost a no-win situation for website owners who don’t have funds, and don’t have extensive knowledge of how to optimize their website so that, even if they fall short on the link popularity, they can still get good search engine ranking.

Not that it’s Google’s responsibility to help you get your web site’s page rank up or to help you keep it up; but Google certainly does little to make it easier for the little guy, and without Google’s seal of approval a website with no page rank or low page and no other means for reaching it’s target audience, has little chance of getting anywhere.

On their website, in their about page, the creators of AGLOCO provide the following information for anyone who might be asking the question “What is AGLOCO?”

Today’s hottest Internet businesses are all about the power of social networks. Companies like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube have become worth billions because businesses have realized that these social networks are generating huge advertising and marketing opportunities. As these social networks grow, the economic potential for its owners – and the advertisers who target the site’s users – is remarkable.

At AGLOCO, we asked a simple question: The users created the community, where’s their share of the profit?

It was from this question that AGLOCO set out to create the Internet’s first Economic Network, harnessing the power of Internet-based social networks to directly benefit the Members who help to create the community.

They go on to detail the number of ways in which they make money for you, or rather you make money for them and they share the money with you, which isn’t to suggest they are bad people. We all need money. We all want money; and we, consumers, are contributing to billion-dollar companies every day while our pockets remain empty. Our stress level continues to climb every day because we don’t have the money we need to pay our bills; and if we tried to beg Bill Gates for $100 bucks he’d shake his head in disgust and tell us we’re shameless to beg him for money when we could just as easily go out and make our own billions.

Bill Gates wouldn’t be a billionaire if millions of us didn’t buy his products. And let’s face it, computers aren’t yet on the list of the hierarchy of human needs. So we made Bill Gates filthy rich buying things we don’t really need. Admittedly, computers make our lives easier; but not having a computer isn’t quite like not having a lung, or even like not having any food to eat, or anywhere to sleep at night. So, when you really think about it, Bill Gates didn’t give us anything we couldn’t have lived without, but we gave him our hard earned dollars anyway. We keep doing that, giving our money, or giving our time that turns into money for someone else, and we give for things we don’t really need while we continue to struggle to acquire the things we do need. Essentially, we get nothing for what we give.

AGLOCO claims to want to change that. They want to become another billion-dollar corporation but to become a billion-dollar corporation they need us to give our time and our money. The more time we give, the more money we spend, the sooner they reach their goal. Is that using us? Yes, but at least they are offering us some of the money they’ll make off of us; so we can really look at it as a business opportunity. We help AGLOCO reach billion-dollar status and we share some of the billions. How many of the billions we get will depend on the how much we contribute to their growth, and that’s only fair isn’t it? Will you get rich as a member of AGLOCO? Probably not, unless you have the ability to build a very big, active network; but who knows, maybe you might make enough to help pay your light bill or something. That’s better than nothing isn’t it? And the premise is, you’re making this money doing nothing other than getting friends to join, and using the AGLOCO viewbar when you do stuff you’re already doing online. So go ahead and join up, you have nothing to lose when you really think about it.

It can’t hurt to have a little money coming in while you work on your strategy and plans for catching the big fish. You want to be AGLOCO, not an AGLOCO member. You want the big money coming to you and you should continue to work on that, but in the meantime, you don’t want to go hungry and homeless because you need energy and you need a secure shelter so that you can continue to pursue your goals.