Can Christian Devotion be measured by Google webmaster tools?
I remember hearing the challenge when I was growing up, “If someone found your checkbook, would they have enough to convict you of being a Christian?”
Christians are often manipulated by guilt, especially for their giving, but there is some poignancy to questioning how much tangible evidence there is of Christ in our lives.
This was brought to my attention recently while monitoring this website with Google‘s Webmaster tools. Webmaster tools gets feed back from the Google crawl bots and helpfully returns a list of what they perceive to be the most important keywords on the site based on frequency and prominence. So I can see tangible evidence for the place that Christ plays in my expression of the Gospel. The bad news is that Christ is 13th on the list! I was somewhat comforted that God made it to #3, but quite humbled that words like: option (#4), new (#7), and search (#12) had out placed Christ!
Difficulty of Christ in the Keywords
However, putting Christ all over your webpage is not necessarily an indication of real devotion. Not to mention that when optimizing for search engines, we should focus on the search phrases we want to target. For example, I want people to know we are a Reformed church in the Williamsport area, and that we belong to the OPC denomination, so that fellow Reformed Christians can find a place to worship in west Williamsport. Can I really be blamed for making our location and denomination prominent? Oh I forgot to mention that OPC was the 2nd most prominent keyword.
Related articles
- The Sabbath Blogging Eschatology (oldlife.org)
- WordPress and Unicorns (Or: Why I Actually Love WordPress) (searchenginewatch.com)
- Theology, Therapy, Twitter, and the Scandal of the Gospel (albertmohler.com)
- THE “G” WEWhen Anti-Christ controls the internet By Grant Swank… (gunnyg.wordpress.com)