From almost the day we started PuneTech, one of our desires has been to build a site that is the top search result on Google for the search Pune Technology. Today, we are proud to report that, as far as we can tell, PuneTech has the top 2 results for this search.

For the last 10 years, the top ranked search result for “Pune Technology” has been a terrible, out-dated, incomplete, and pointless list of ‘IT Companies in Pune’ from PuneDiary.com. We’ve always hated the fact that the world saw that obsolete page instead of something more current, and a couple of months back, when we (reported that PuneTech now has a pagerank of 5](http://punetech.com/minor-celebration-time-punetech-com-now-has-a-google-page-rank-of-5/), we shamelessly let it be known that we wanted to dislodge PuneDiary from the number 1 slot.

We’re very happy that it has finally happened.

Drop in pagerank and PuneTech Wiki discontinued

Sadly, we have to report that our pagerank has once again dropped from 5 to 4. After some investigation, we believe that this drop is because of spam and vandalism happening on the PuneTech Wiki. Also, the PuneTech Wiki has not really lived up to our expectations, and hence, starting today, we have disabled the PuneTech wiki. Some of the pages in the Wiki have been migrated, but the rest is just gone. It wasn’t worth keeping around.

More details: The PuneTech Wiki was a section of the PuneTech website that was modeled after the wikipedia (and in fact used the same software (Mediawiki)). The idea was the the community would collaborate to create interesting and useful content. However after trying that for 3 years, we have given it up as a failed experiment. Most of the content on the wikipedia was added by us, and very little content came from others. The amount of work needed to keep the wiki free from spammers and vandals outweighed the benefits of having the wiki. That is the reason why we have turned off the wiki.

The PuneTech Directory

In its place we hope to create a PuneTech Directory. It already has a listing of the most important tech user groups, organizations and mailing lists in Pune, a way to find the most interesting techies in Pune, and a list of the top-ranked websites in Pune.

Other content, specially lists of companies (organized by industry/speciality) will be added soon. We will do it ourselves, manually, as and when we find time.

How to do SEO the hard way

It has taken us too long to reach number #1. The reason is that there are a lot of things that we should have done, but did not do.

We did not do SEO (Search Engine Optimization). We did not do link-building. We did not spend too much time thinking about crafting headlines and first paragraphs with search traffic in mind. We did not add lots of content on a regular basis to ensure a high flow of traffic. We did not keep an eye on what is ‘hot’ on any given week/month and then try to write stories around those concepts (keywords). (On a separate note: we also are aware that the design of the site is terrible and both the looks as well as the usability need lots of work.)

We do realize that all the above things are important – and that anybody building a website for commercial reasons must focus on the above issues, and much more. Specifically, we are NOT implying that these activities are somehow distasteful and that good people should not do them. In fact, we hope more good people focus on these things, and less of the bad people.

But, PuneTech is different. PuneTech is a non-commercial activity that we do in our free time because we like doing it. Because we are having fun doing it. And the SEO/design related activities are not our idea of fun. That is the only reason we have not spent too much time on them.

So how did we reach #1? The slow, painful, old-fashioned way. Content. Unique content. Good quality content. Articles that are interesting for people. Information that we think people should be reading. We are glad to report that “Content is King” is still true.

Thank You

There have been lots of people, too numerous to list, who have helped PuneTech in various ways, and had a big hand in making it what it is today. Special mention must go to the Pune Open Coffee Club, which started around the same time as PuneTech and the two forums have been very complementary to each other.

Together, we have made the Pune community one of the most active and vibrant communities in the country.