I've Officially Been Out-Blogged by Jeff and Grace Safrin! (For Now, At Least!)

    I can't believe it!  I find I'm forced to concede defeat for a day or two thanks to one single blog and Google's ability to almost instantly index blog posts made here on ActiveRain!

    I have a fairly unique last name, and as embarrassing as it sounds, getting my website/blogsite to come up at the top of the search rankings in google has been difficult, thanks largely to my previous life as a child actor.  As you may know, Google likes fresh, unique content and they use some sort of automagical (thanks,  Rebecca Levinson!) formula to determine what websites come first for a given search term.  The amount of time a website has been around also factors heavily, so if a given site has been around for 10+ years (and has been consistently updated), it's very likely that it may come up in a search term before a more recent site does, even if the newer site has more relevant content (confused yet?).

    The point is, there's a few websites that come up when you search my name before my own website comes up (essentially, websites about me are more popular than my own page!).  No worries, I take it all in stride, and I've been working very hard the last 4 months to get my website onto the first page in google when my name is searched.  For the record, my ActiveRain profile, is #4, beating both Amazon.com and Hollywood.com (hooray!).

    Yesterday, Jeff and Grace Safrin were kind enough to feature my blog post "A Theory About Dogs and Real Estate" in their post "Hidden Gem in The Rain- Jonathan Benya- Lucky Dogs Thanks to Him!".  Within 20 minutes, Google managed to process their post, identify the Header, recognize my name repeated in the text, and determined that their post was relevant to searches for my name! 

    Almost instantly this automagical process that google uses placed them in the number 5 spot for searches on "Jonathan Benya".  Simply Astounding!  Because Google regularly crawls ActiveRain, it identified their post as more relevant than my own blog at http://www.teambenya.com Because their content was more recent and obviously unique!

    This underscores how important and significant ActiveRain really IS for our daily business! Consider that a single post managed to trump 62,000 search returns within 20 minutes of it's CREATION  simply because it was made HERE on ActiveRain!  What do you think something like that could do for search terms involving short sales or foreclosures in your local area? 

    ActiveRain posts have the potential to increase you visibility to clients quickly and dramatically, and the title of your Posts in relation to your content are VERY IMPORTANT!  Keep it in mind when you're trying to increase your online presence/visibility and happy blogging to you all!