Ade in Business

Mwhaha. Mwhahaha. Mwhahahaha. Mwhahahahaha. etc.

Now you know: my geek laughter sounds very much like evil villain laughter.

I’ve complained a lot about being stuck in the Google sandbox — the purgatory that Google places new sites for several months to a year until Google feels like a site is established enough to be properly inducted into the Internet world. While in the sandbox, sites don’t fare well in Google search results, if they even show up at all.

One of the symptoms of being in the sandbox is that you don’t get a PageRank - Google’s proprietary rating that’s used to weight which sites rank higher in search results. The higher the PageRank the better, and with a perfect 10 being awarded to very few sites (e.g. Google.com), even a medium ranking in the 4-6 range is very admirable.

So I was elated (yes, geek elation) to not only see my sites receive a PageRank, but receive very respectable scores:

• http://www.formspring.com - 5
• http://www.ponyfish.com - 6
• http://www.recursivefunction.com - 5
• http://blog.olonoh.com - 3

It might still be a while until the sites rank higher in search results for certain keywords, as I might have to wait for the “Google Dance” when Google updates their search results for top keywords.

Why do I care about all this? Getting on the first page of Google search results for your target keywords is gold. Especially when there are millions (or billions) of results for those keywords. Especially when you’re running a small, Internet-based business. Whether I like Google or not, their search engine is in a position to make or break a company like mine. (For any Google employees that are reading this - I LOVE Google).

On a related note, does anyone find it interesting that Google’s PageRank is 10, while Yahoo and MSN’s PageRanks are 9? That would irk me if I was an exec at either of those companies.