So after reading an article in the Washington Post on how Ted Leonsis (owner of the Caps and co-AOL founder) manipulated Google’s algorithms to pull up favorable links about himself first, I thought, “hum, I wonder where this tiny little blog stands in the list of Google hits?”
So I first typed in my name, Ren McCormack, into the search field. Guess what? This blog came up 4th on the list and my Flickr account came up 5th.
That’s pretty respectable, if you ask me.
Next, I typed in Footloose.
And, well, let’s say the results are not so respectable. On my first search, I went through all 83 pages of results. This blog did not show up. But, this message was at the bottom of page 83:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 822 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
Have you ever gone through 83 pages of search results before? Don’t worry, no one in the history of the Internet has. Until now.
So, I repeated the search with the omitted results included. Again, I went through every page (this time 99 pages of results). Still no hits. Even the Penn State Thespian Club and Google’s own list of photo search results were listed. How demoralizing.
Then I thought to myself, “What if I include the word ‘blog’ in my search? Surely then this blog will show up.” Nope. I repeated the same process as above, going through the first 83 pages then clicking the “omitted results” link. Now, I would expect that blogs like Stuck in the 80s would show up before mine. But I wouldn’t expect that a body building blog that makes a passing reference to the song Footloose would. I thought the 7,405 hits this blog has received (as of this posting) combined with the Flickr hits would count for something. Naive me. Sure, that’s a drop in the ocean of the web, but it should count for something, right? RIGHT?! Ok, now I’m officially depressed. Defeated. And what do people do when they feel defeated? Drink heavily. But I can’t do that now, I’m at work. I’ll do that tonight while watching Earl and The Office. What else do humans do when defeated? Answer: justify it.
Here’s my justification. I could add tags, name drop (did I mention my lunch with Kevin Bacon last week? It was ab fab), or link to other blogs, but that would call into question the purpose of this blog. Is the purpose to gain net notoriety or to become the next Pink is the New Blog or Wonkette ? Nope. Fundamentally, the purpose here is to manage the team during the season and provide an avenue for information dissemination both during, after, and prefer the season. Heck, most of my friends don’t even know this blog exists. Lord knows that I won’t tell my fam either (the pics are just a little too incriminating).
So don’t worry, folks. I’m not going to sell out and start working at Time magazine like some other blogger. I’m here to stay. But don’t be surprised if you don’t see a few more tags and links showing up either…
