Your fifteen minutes of fame on Google

I entered “Ripples” in Google tonight and got the surprise of my life. My weblog appeared at the top of the first page. I was #1 of 470,000 listings for Ripples!

Ripples
Ripples. In a category of its own – stable data for handling a turbulent world. Jan 05, 2004. An Irreverent View of Paradigm Shifts – Pt 2. … ripples.typepad.com/ – 92k – Cached – Similar pages [ More results from ripples.typepad.com ]

Clicking on “more results from ripples.typepad.com..” produced pages of listings from my weblog. I was absolutely shocked. The last time I had tried this, I showed up on page 10, where no one would ever find me.

As I sat here basking in my own glory, I decided to enter “Smokyblog” in Google . It also showed up as #1!

What is this? Has every blogger I know become famous?

I tried “Fragments“, “DaGoddess“, “Switched at Birth“, and “What’s your Brand Mantra” with the same results.

All of these blog names showed up on Google as the #1 pick!

I don’t know if we are just hitting our stride, or if Google has changed the way they rank websites. Whatever it is, it feels just great to appear as #1 on the world’s greatest search engine, even for a transitory moment.

Give yourself a lift and enter your blog name in Google. Maybe you’ll have a nice surprise.

UPDATE:

On a hunch, I entered my own name in Google and… lo and behold, it appeared before all others!

I tried the same with Fred First and Jennifer Rice and got the same result. We are getting personal publicity from our weblog exposure! This area of personal publicity is worth a whole blog post in itself, but more importantly, it holds out a promise of some commercial potential!

I need to finish the endless rewriting of my novel, Fallen Gods, about Prometheus’ return to earth and get it published while the glow still lasts. 🙂

Wayne Hurlburt, a frequent visitor to this site and the creator of Blog Business World, has written about the esoteric aspects of search engine optimization. Unfortunately, my head begins to hurt when I try to understand the permutations and combinations involved in site ranking.

All I can say is that I made no conscious effort to play to the strengths of Google or any other search engine. I just write from the heart and try to frame my output in a way it can be easily understood.

Maybe there is something to this idea of weblog as the ultimate power tool.