Why is the internet very similar to real-life communities?

The internet surely has some very big similarities with how real life communities function. A website online is very similar to a home. You can furnish your home, put lots of content (decoration) on it, make sure the foundation is coded properly, and that all the pages (rooms) are properly linked together with the rest of the pages (living room and kitchen) on your website.

Another similarity of the online environment with real-life society is the presence of links or neighbors. Your home-website is composed of your own family – a programmer, a writer, a web designer, and all those involved in making that website work. There are plenty of websites online, and some of them are closely related to each other.

These websites often initiate bonds or links with each other in order to grow better in their online community. These websites help promote each other’s content and products; they help share traffic or visitors with one another, and they function to help supplement each other and those people with the same interests with the information they need about a certain subject or category.

These online communities also hold contests and awards for the best websites, much similar to how real-life society creates challenges and gives award to different people or families that have excelled in their particular field. However, the closest similarity to online community competitions is the real-life challenge dubbed the ‘American Idol’.

Online communities also have what is called ‘Online Idols’, which is judged or spearheaded also by three famous judges – Google, Yahoo and MSN. Every once in awhile they give out awards to those websites which have performed well in terms of content quality, number of visits from online audience, and their relationships with other websites online. These websites that perform well are placed on the top ranks of the search results. Google however likes giving an added sweetener to the awards and provide a PR value to range the well-performing websites in an event called the Google Dance.

Those are just some of the most common similarities among online websites and real-life communities. Online websites that have quality links or relationships with other websites of the same category are praised online, and their PR and rank are often very high on the search engines. However, those websites that don’t have quality links or are related with what is commonly referred to as PPC pages or Porn, Pills and Casino related websites, may not fare very well on the search engine results.

It is very important to have quality reciprocal links, especially with an already high PR or quality webpage. If you have an inbound link coming from a PR 7 or 8 or high traffic website, there is a good chance you will get some of the good traffic shared to you by that website. If you build a network of websites ranging from mid to high traffic classifications, you will surely get good exposure online. Authority links coming from high quality websites are very much preferred. If you reciprocate them with your own outgoing link, to help them with traffic, it would still be greatly beneficial for the both of you.

Popularity: 36% [?]