Pagerank
Originally published at SilverPen Pub. You can comment here or there.
When I first started my website back in 2004, I registered it as spiritgod21.com and, to justify the .com suffix, I registered for Google Adsense and placed discrete advertisements on all my pages. Over the course of the next year or so, I made maybe $7 off these ads, and since Google doesn’t send you a check until you hit $100, I didn’t really make anything. I always felt like a bit of a sellout, having ads on my page, so when I made a new site last August, I chose the .net suffix and committed myself to having no advertisements.
One of the drawbacks of not having Google Adsense is that my page isn’t ranked as highly as it was before. Google claims that having Adsense on your site doesn’t change your pagerank, but I think it’s telling that if you search for my name, my site doesn’t show up until pages 3-5 in the search results. When I had ads, it was on page one. To be fair, I partly blame this fact of poor search results on having lost some readership when my site was down for over a year, and that’s certainly not Google’s fault*, but I occasionally look at my miniscule pagerank (the number that approximately denotes how Google views your site and therefore gives an idea of where you’ll be ranked in search results) and get depressed.
Until yesterday, when my pagerank rose 2 points (out of 10) to a firm 3. I know, 3’s still pretty small, but it’s encouraging to me to see the number go up at all. What’s kind of sad, though, is that it is all because of my tech blog.
I guess it shouldn’t surprise me; people search for tech stuff more than they do for poetry or the random junk I usually write about. I’d just avoided having a blog dedicated to technology for so long and had tried to avoid it that, again, I feel like a bit of a sellout for having one. Still, despite how it’s related to my job and how nerdy it is, technology’s a big part of my life and I kind of like writing about it. And on the plus side, it has drawn more attention to my writing; prior to this, my photo gallery got the most hits, but now the two blogs I host on my site are above the photo gallery by quite a bit.
As a final note on this subject of blogs, there’s been a bit of controversy over the FnC blog and Brian was asking himself why we bother with it in the first place, as it seems to have pretty much no readership. We’ll probably keep it, but if we don’t, chances are I’ll be starting a ministry-focused blog on my site as well. Heck, that might be fun just to do anyways. Lord knows, I always need more motivation to write.
*Originally, I had mistyped this as faul, which Firefox had not flagged as being misspelled. At first, I thought this meant there was some obscure were spelled faul that I was unfamiliar with, but now Firefox is underlining it in red. Sadness; I was all excited about the potential of learning a new word.