Here is a really good example of the power of a blog:
- Go to www.google.com.
- Type “Rod” in the search box.
- Click “I feel lucky!”.
That’s right our Rod is the #1 Rod in the whole world!
What about Rod Stewart (with more than $250m of album sales, and six consecutive UK #1 albums) or Rod Laver (the only professional tennis player in history to win all four grand slams in the same year) or Rod Steiger (who won an Academy Award for best actor in 1967) or even Rod Flanders (son of Ned)?
All less important, according to Google.
As far as I can tell, none of them have a blog. Coincidence? ;-)
Amazingly this also works if you search for “Rowan Simpson” even though I’ve only been doing this blog for just over six months.
Thanks to everybody who has linked here or commented. You’ve all made it much easier for people who are looking to find me on Google.
And hopefully you’ve enjoyed some of what I’ve written in the process.
Helps if you use google.co.nz and are sitting in NZ … think you’ll find that Rod is the #1 “Rod” in NZ for Kiwi’s.
If you go to Google.COM I got a Wikipedia page about Alex Rodriguez … curious
I too get Alex Rodriguez. My guess is that the reason Rod is No1 for you is because Google knows you frequently visits Rod’s page (by sneakily capturing your web history?). Or, it’s surruptitiously switching you over to the .co.nz results because of your IP.
Interesting. Thanks for your comments.
I’m sure Rod will be gutted to hear that. He was very excited when I showed him it working.
I tried this over the weekend at the Morgo conference on a laptop which wasn’t mine and it worked. I typed in google.com but it might well have re-directed under the covers to google.co.nz.
Independent of that, I think the point still stands: it’s great to be able to write your own Google profile.
Ahh Rowan things were looking so good there for a minute. Your basic premise is good but now all people can see is the sad fact that Rod isn’t number one galactically.
Oh well give Xero a few more years and that might change!
Well apparently I paint Civil war reenactments!
The Google NZ vs. Google international one is interesting. I’m sure they serve up different results based on your location that is why I am more into .co.nz addresses these days as they seem to have higher rankings when searching in New Zealand.
Rowan, I noticed that your Google had switched to .co.nz at Morgo conference.
If you click “go to google.com” and search “Rod” still comes in 3rd or 4th, but is probably using your IP number to give NZ relevance.
I just tried an anonymiser service (some foreign IP number) and went to google.com and Rod has unfortunately disapeared down the list.
Still very impressive that Rod beats all the other Rod’s in NZ. World famous in …?
Well that was embaressing
Rod D is Rod #5 from here in Australia using Google.com. Impressive.
I agree blogging increases the number of pages that link to a specific blog and as a consequence, the Google PageRank works very well (in other words ) to rank pages with top outward links very high. Also, the other effect is the frequency of the appearance of Rod’s name being quoted in other sources but not linking to Rod’s blog. Google works to rate higher pages that have higher outlinks & also frequencies of terms in pages, in which Rod seems to catch both simultaneously. I have noticed that more and more people are linking to Rod.