And Thy House
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History of
Cane Creek
Association
by D. F. Magruder
Pay For PageRank
Written By: Timothy Fish Published: 2/10/2007
I received an unsolicited e-mail message the other day. It surprised me because it wasn’t a mass mailing, but the man was clearly pushing something. He had looked at the church’s website, knew the Google PageRank and was trying to convince me to use his services to get the website up to the next level. I gave the man points for ingenuity, but I deleted the message anyway.
Like most webmasters, I would love to see all of my websites have a high rank on Google. A high rank translates into more traffic and more traffic translates into the ability to communicate with more people. Getting high rank requires one of two things. Time an effort can be spent developing a network of links from other sites or money can be spent to pay someone like the person who sent the email message to do it, but when it is a church website, the question is whether it is really worth it.
We have a tendency to assume that anything we do for God is of infinite worth. This is far from the case. Just because the website is for God doesn’t mean that it is worth dumping endless amounts of time or money into it. Instead, we should figure out what it is that we want the website to be able to do and determine what it will take to get it there.
For the South Park Baptist Church website, I wanted people to be able to find it. I wanted it to be a source of information about the church and I wanted it to be a tool to help the church reach people outside of the church. I am happy to say that it is doing all of those things. It isn’t that there are not things that I could do to increase the PageRank. There are plenty of things that can be done, but since the site is reaching all of its goals, my time is better spent doing other things. The site is already a source of some information that does not seem to be covered anywhere else. Since that is the case, it will be high in the search results for some things even though it has a lower PageRank than what it could have.
The point here is that even though PageRank is an important indicator of how visible a website is, it is not he only indicator and with a church website it may be even less important than a website that is in a more competitive market.
Timothy Fish is the webmaster for the South Park Baptist Church website. He is also the author of the book Church Website Design: A Step By Step Approach.
www.timothyfish.com