Rankings – An Inexact Science For Business Colleges And Blogs

In the Indianapolis Business Journal a couple of weeks ago, a small item caught my eye, “Vaunted Program Hits Turbulence”. Apparently Ball State University’s entrepreneurship program hadn’t made the list in the U.S. News & World Report 2007 rankings of graduate programs in business, while its undergraduate program was taken down a couple of ranking notches.  Meanwhile, Indiana University’s entrepreneurship undergrad program shot up to second place in the rankings, and its graduate program up to sixth.

Rod Davis, interim dean of Ball State’s Miller College of Business, had this to say about his school’s slide in U.S. News & World Report:  “Rankings in themselves are an inexact science.”  This might sound to you like a “sour grapes” sort of reaction, but I must say that remark rings all too true with me, based on my experience with a different kind of ranking.

Blogging on the Internet is all about moving up in the rankings. As a professional ghost blogger, what I’m hired to help my clients do is “win” search engine rankings.  That means that when someone is online searching for information about a topic or a product related to your business, you want your blog to be on Page One of Google, Yahoo, or MSN.  Each search engine has its own “algorithms” for judging the merits of blogs and hence how that blog is ranked.

We do know certain things about search engine rankings.  For example, we know there are four general keys to success: posting often, continuing to post, building up “equity” through cumulative posting, and providing original, relevant content. But no one knows of an exact formula that, on any given day, is guaranteed to “win search”. As Rod Davis  so aptly (and ruefully) pointed out, “Rankings in themselves are an inexact science.”