A book I recently read, Naked Conversations, talks all about the benefits of blogging, and specifically blogging in the corporate world. It was a great read, and maybe someday I'll review the book. But the point I wanted to mention is that the book says blogs get "Google Juice". This "Google Juice" seems to be some brand of magic that makes blogs much more visible on the next and highly ranked by search engines. And, my, do I have an example.

For the past eight years, I've been running cMusicWeb.com, a music review site that I was doing the old-fashioned way. It was just a static site that just looked a lot nicer and more organized than when it was on GeoCities, but technically it wasn't that much better. The site has built a pretty good reputation over those eight years, gathering links from around the web and listed several times on DMOZ. It's gotten pretty well and some artist pages rank well for their respective artists.

In the past four months we've started our transition to inReview.net, our new name and new brand. The site isn't really complete yet, but already its Drupal software and blog-style format have been making waves. A quick look at Yahoo!'s results finds already more links than cMusicWeb.com ever had. Of course, they're not all quality links like cMusicWeb.com had, but links from blog aggregating sites like Technorati and the like are nto bad. I attribute most of it to the pervasiveness of RSS feeds and RSS aggregators.

Of course, hopefully soon it will get us listed in Google. I don't know if this is what people refer to as the "sandbox," but it seems we have to get mroe quality links to gain any ranking in Google. Or maybe we just have to be out there for a while. We'll see.