I’m actually out of my own free will promoting another website here! haha, I know, no one is paying me or anything. I guess you might say that I feel that I sort of owe it to Petition Online for all the valuable service they’ve provided over the years. They sort of seem like an old friend of mine, and I really hate to see them losing power! When I first started using PetitionOnline.com they were a PR7 and doing quite well! Over the years I’ve made 29 petitions myself… amazing to look back at them. Most were complete silliness in fact and I use them because you can add an option to put websites with your signatures so I use them for link quality back to my sites. In creating so many petitions I’ve also created a lot of content for them and they get money out of that so it’s really a win, win situation for us. Allowing URL’s in your signatures isn’t always a great idea, and I’ve started to advance my petition creating techniques to avoid spammers with forcing people to either agree or disagree with the petitions! It works out, and yet even with how few petitions I actually see that allow you to put links in your signatures they still get quite a few spammers, so I figure whatever I can do to get things out of the ordinary is a good thing.

Anyways, the reason I am really writing this is because Petition Online seems to of added a new feature! PetitionOnline.com is a small branch of Artifice Inc. From every aspect I look at it PetitionOnline.com has no bearings on the Artifice company, but I will give them credit for creating the site! Artifice, Inc. is an architecture company, I’ve never been exactly sure on what they do, but I believe they make CAD software, along with some other things relating to the business. So where do petitions come in? Quite simple, they give link quality! What better way of getting thousands of incoming links to your website than allowing other people to create the content for you? In the early days of Web 2.0 the concepts behind PetitionOnline.com are simply ingenious, and have even kept their strength through several evolutions of the net… but since PetitionOnline was doing it’s job, and it was not their main business it got neglected quite a bit with very few updates and slow at that. Because of this neglect the strength they once found in Petition Online has begun to dwindle a bit. The once iconic PR7 PetitionOnline.com has slipped all the way down to a PR5 even though Petition Online is stronger than they’ve ever been! The reason for this is simple, content is being spewed out on the net at an astronomical rate. Most of you don’t look at things this way but every article I publish on this site is a new page, every ten I publish is another new page, every different day I publish on is another new page, every tag I include is yet ANOTHER new page… which is partially why Petition Online did so good in the early days, they took advantage of this page creation early on. Every petition created was three new pages, every hundred signatures was another new page. This very much so helped out the spread of information for Petition Online, however others have caught on and things seem to be changing rapidly. For one I generally include a minimum of five tags per entry on this blog alone, that’s six pages created with every entry no matter what. The way that PR or Page Rank works is simple it takes the number of indexed pages that Google has online and gives you a rating based upon the number of pages that point to yours on average with the number of pages that point to other pages on the net… it also factors in the strength of those links. The people behind Petition Online finally got the drift though and have now added a feature that allows you to add tags to your petition. This feature will definitely increase the value of Petition Online again, only I fear it may be a slow process, which is why I am content with helping them out a bit with some incoming links and news articles to get people using their new feature.

I’m sure many of you have used or signed petitions on PetitionOnline.com and surely owe them a favor for hosting the site at the very least. I know with their addition of the FaceBook button a while back I’ve seen a number of petitions end up on Facebook as groups getting people to sign their petition, which is very much so a help, but it needs more. We’ve got to keep the free ideas marketplace alive!