Sugarrae - Never Mess With a Woman Who Can Pull Rank

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I noticed today that it has been a year since the Sugarrae blog launched. Then I remembered that I had written a document with some basic stats about it when I launched it to be able to compare it later. So, I figured I’d share its progress.

First, some back information… I went by the username chrisnrae for a long time online. I had been using it for years and when I fell into this industry I never expected my choice of nickname to be a “brand”.

About six months after I got divorced, I begged for mercy from the online forum gods owners, and against the advice of some friends who thought re-branding myself would cause me damage and going along with the advice of some friends who felt any potential damage was worth not being stuck with that name for life, I went through with the change, after some careful consideration on choosing a new one (I was warned that the new one was permanent).

Where did Sugarrae come from? Well, I wanted to keep the name Rae in the nickname and wracked my brain for combinations. The name ended up being a hat tip to Sugar Ray Leonard (not this one and god no, not this one). I bought the domain in March of 2005 and went through my “brand change” (hahaha) immediately after.

I already had a personal blog and I put nothing more than a one page site up, straight vanilla, with a few thumbnail pictures and some links to where I hung out on the web (think old school college bookmark page) and used my new email address.

Once I started speaking, I became a little more “on the radar” then I would have liked and industry people other than my friends were showing up on my personal blog. At the same time, my personal blog imploded and I lost two years worth of posts. I figured it was a sign I needed a bit more of a professional space for my online alter ego.

So, I hired my blog designer with a very specific theme in mind… a shadowed girl, holding a gun, in a James Bond circle with psychedelic “Laugh-In” colors. I think she nailed it. ;-)

The domain was nearly virgin on launch. It was almost a year old, but again, was a one page site (two if you count the canonical issue from lack of giving a shit). Now, to be fair, I did 301 the old personal blog into it so people could find my new home. The sugarrae.com domain itself had 404 backlinks in Yahoo, showing 1-46 (many of those were range of sites from people who killed their blogroll link to the old blog with the new one in the week when one site was yanked and the other launched.

It had 2 pages indexed in Google and zero feed subscribers (I never redirected the feed from my personal blog). I ranked number five in Google for Rae Hoffman, number six for Sugarrae and no where for plain Rae (and this site is personal, not profit, so those are the only terms I was interested in). I had one link from technorati. On the day it launched, the blog had one post and four comments.

Now, on its first birthday, the stats have changed a bit (I never tracked traffic before the launch and never did after the launch until about five months ago).

February 2006: 2 pages indexed at Google
February 2007: 85 pages indexed at Google

February 2006: 404 backlinks in Yahoo for link domain, showing 1 through 46
February 2007: 9,211 backlinks (floats between 8 and 12K) in Yahoo for link domain, showing 1-1000

February 2006: Number five for Rae Hoffman, number six for Sugarrae, no where for Rae
February 2007: Number one and two for Rae Hoffman, number one and two for Sugarrae, number ten for Rae

February 2006: Pagerank one
February 2007: Pagerank six on homepage, pagerank four on blog subfolder that was launched four months ago

February 2006: 2 technorati links
February 2007: 341 links from 158 blogs to the root and 199 links from 106 blogs to the blog subfolder from technorati (I know, I don’t know why they treat them as two separate sites and they assure me they will fix this)

February 2006: 0 feed subscribers
February 2007: 682 feed subscribers

February 2006: 1 post
February 2007: 54 posts (seems I post once a week on average)

February 2006: 4 comments
February 2007: 398 comments

The blog has two big issues left to be ironed out. The first is my fault, as I need to redirect feedburner’s feed to my own site because it sometimes causes me duplicate content issues in Google. I have lacked caring, but probably should fix that soon (before the precise pastry whore bitches at me for not doing it yet – someone get Michael a napkin for his monitor please).

The second is that I suspect Google does not like the amount of 301 redirects (ten of them in all, nine vanity domains and one the old personal blog) being pointed into this blog, but that’s their problem, not mine.

So there you have it. Sugarrae is simply a brand site to me where I can rant or write about whatever I choose… I use it as my “home on the web” but have never actively developed links to it or “promoted it”, aside from a dmoz listing. I’m anal on the design, because it is a representation of “me”. But, aside from that, it doesn’t get much focus. It’s been interesting to see how it has grown over the last year and should be interesting to see how it grows over the next.