BlueCapra

Using Technology To Solve Problems and Create Solutions

1st on Google – Week 14

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1st on Google - 14th Week - Alan ReevesWelcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 14th update.  If you missed the any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 13th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 04-29-12 (click here to do your own search):

  • #5 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #5)
  • #11 – The About Me page from my personal blog, BlueCapra.com, with picture (up 5 places from last week at #12)
  • #21 – My Google+ profile (no change from last week at #21)
  • #23 – My personal blog, BlueCapra.com, with picture (up 26 places from last week at #49)
  • #28 – My profile on Vimeo – check out my video series Can You Etch It (up 25 place from last week at #52)
This week I am at #5, same as last week.  The links occupying the top 4 spots include IMDb, Wikipedia (twice), and a Facebook link for the Immature Entrepreneur, Alan Reeves (not me).  This last one is a bit of a surprise as I have not seen it that high up ever, usually hovering around #8 or lower.  My first occurrence is at #5 and overall, my top 5 results Increased 56 places with the first 5 results all occurring in the first 28 places.  I showed up 12 times in the top 100 search results which is a new record.  It does seem that the results can fluctuate a great deal week to week (sometimes referred to as the Google dance) but the same big sites are showing up time and time again.

It is very interesting to see my LinkedIn profile ranking ahead of the general Alan Reeves LinkedIn search.  It appears that I am making a little progress.  Another result down the line was my profile to Quora, a question and answer site I just signed up for a few days before.  It is always a surprise when some off-the-wall link shows up in the top 100.

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #1 again and a total of 13 occurrences in the top 100 images.  That is down a bit from last week with 20 images, but image searches is very much an interesting search, but not very useful at the present time.

Cornering the market – from Google to Bing

Last week, I started to check Bing in addition to Google due to the percentage of the US searches being performed on Google, Bing, and Yahoo (which is powered by Bing technology).  Here are the top 3 Bing results (there were only 3 in the top 100):

Overall, I showed up 3 times in the top 100 search results on Bing.  My first occurrence was at #2 (compared with Google at #5) and my top 3 results increased 21 place with is small consolidation since there were only 3 top 100 results.  I tried another image search but did not see any images in the first 100 or so results.

Strategies for 1st

This week I commented on about 7 posts, published 5 posts myself, including 1 video, pretty much the same thing I do every week.  I did, however, make a discovery; my sitemaps were not being indexed like they should have been.

There are a few ways to make sure Google knows about your site.  You can wait for Google to find you through links or you can submit a list of all your pages and posts, a sitemap, to Google via Webmaster tools.  You can both submit sitemaps under Webmaster tools and check on the status of the indexing.  When I checked the sitemaps for both of my sites, BlueCapra.com and BookWormLaser.com, not all the sitemaps were there.  With a little tweaking and about an hour or two, I had three sitemaps for each site being indexed, one for the pages, one for images, and one for videos.

The result is a total of 550 web results indexed, 175 images, and 1 video.  It looks like there is still an issue with the video sitemap as I should have about 42 videos according to the video sitemap, but that gives me something to do this week.

Summary – The search for Alan Reeves

I’ve been able to make a good amount of progress so far, going from #93 on 1-25-12 to #3 on 3-11-12 even though I have slipped to #5. I have learned a lot about improving search ranking and I have made a lot of mistakes, but this is a learning process.  I hope to make significant progress by next week and regain my past progress.  Stay tuned to see if next week is the week I reach the 1st spot on Google and Bing.  If you have any suggestions to get me there, leave a comment and let me know.

Check out next week’s update – Week 15

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