{"id":894,"date":"2009-04-16T20:28:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-16T20:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/blogs\/paul\/post\/Are-we-too-obsessed-with-rankings.aspx"},"modified":"2015-06-22T16:41:27","modified_gmt":"2015-06-22T23:41:27","slug":"are-we-too-obsessed-with-rankings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/are-we-too-obsessed-with-rankings\/","title":{"rendered":"Are we too obsessed with rankings?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n<font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">This feels like a bit of a strange post for me to make, but I want to make it anyway, and don&#39;t take it the wrong way&#8230;<\/font>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">I&#39;ve recently started following <\/font><font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">SQLBatman&#39;s blog<\/font><font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\"> and I was astounded that he had to post a follow-up to his list of SQL blogger rankings (disclaimer: including ours &#8211; thanks!) because he&#39;d been getting emails from people who obviously weren&#39;t as high in his list as they thought they should be, even though they were *his* rankings of their blogs. It struck me that with the amazingly connected society we live in now, and the ubiquitousness of things like blogs, Facebook (to which we&#39;re unfortunately addicted), and Twitter (which we&#39;re sternly resisting so far)&nbsp;&#8211; maybe we&#39;re becoming a little too focused on how popular our blogs are or how many people are following our Twitter feeds?<\/font>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">I used to be like that. When I first started blogging about 3 years ago on the <\/font><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/sqlserverstorageengine\/\"><font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">Storage Engine blog<\/font><\/a><font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\"> at Microsoft, and then when I left and switched to this one a year later, I was pretty obsessed with how many people were reading the blog posts. Was I posting interesting info? Could I get away with jokes? Would my opinions offend someone? Was anyone linking to me? Why aren&#39;t I in XYZ&#39;s blog-roll?<\/font>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">Then I realized that, to be honest,&nbsp;the obsessing&nbsp;was taking the fun out of blogging and now I don&#39;t pay that&nbsp;much attention to the stats and just post stuff I think is interesting. I wanted to do this blog post to give a piece of advice to new bloggers and those who thought they should be higher up in, or just in, SQLBatman&#39;s (or anyone else&#39;s) rankings: don&#39;t get wrapped up in the numbers and rankings, and don&#39;t complain when someone doesn&#39;t rank your blog as highly as you think they should, or list it in their blog-roll. It&#39;s very easy to get bitter when a post doesn&#39;t get the numbers you think, or no-one links to it, and then start thinking along the lines of &quot;why am I spending all this time doing this when no-one&#39;s watching?&quot;<\/font>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">People are watching &#8211; there are thousands of &#39;lurkers&#39; our there who you&#39;ll never see and never hear from, but they&#39;re watching and learning from what you post.&nbsp;Just focus on the content and if it&#39;s good you&#39;ll be discovered and\/or ranked higher. Don&#39;t think about what to post that will make your ranking higher, think about what to post that&#39;s unique, interesting. and useful to people in the community.&nbsp;You can&#39;t really control what people think of what you post. I&#39;m sure some people won&#39;t like this post, but I&#39;m going to post it anyway.<\/font>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<font face=\"verdana,geneva\" size=\"2\">From Field of Dreams 2: &quot;If you build it, they will come&quot;.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This feels like a bit of a strange post for me to make, but I want to make it anyway, and don&#39;t take it the wrong way&#8230; I&#39;ve recently started following SQLBatman&#39;s blog and I was astounded that he had to post a follow-up to his list of SQL blogger rankings (disclaimer: including ours &#8211; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Are we too obsessed with rankings? - Paul S. 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