The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.This is the 62nd update for my attempt to rank first for my name, Alan Reeves. If you missed the any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 61st Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 3-31-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#12 – My About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (down 1 place from last week at #11)
#27 – My videos on Vimeo (up 3 places from last week at #30)
#28 – My LinkedIn profile (up 26 places from last week at #54)
#46 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Pinterest (up 15 places from last week at #61)
#60 – @BookWormLaser on Twitter (up 13 places from last week at #73)

This week I’m at #12. Overall, my top 5 results increased 56 places with 1 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 8 times in the top 100 search results.

A check at Google Images showed my picture at #5 and a total of 6 occurrences in the top 100 images.

Cornering the market – from Google to Bing

In addition to searching Google, I have been checking Bing results for my name, Alan Reeves (click here to do your own Bing search for Alan Reeves). Here are the top 5 Bing results:

#2 – My LinkedIn profile (up 1 place from last week at #3)
#8 – My Facebook profile (no change from last week at #8)
#14 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (no change from last week at #14)
#23 – My profile on 48Days.net (down 3 places from last week at #20)
#28 – Alan Reeves on BrandYourself (down 5 places from last week at #23)

This week I’m at #2 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results decreased 7 places with 4 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 9 times in the top 100 search results.

A check at Bing Images showed my picture at #8 and a total of 7 occurrences in the top 100 images.

Strategies for 1st

This week, my main target was Quora where I tried to help by giving my perspective on a few questions. I also left a few blog comments. I did notice a big issue with one of my 301 redirects which I think affected my results here.

Without going into too much boring detail of the structure of this site and my business site hosting, I can say that I have a lot of 301 redirects in my htaccess file on Book Worm Laser & Design. For some reason, the redirect for this site was overriding a natural link on BookWormLaser.com. So, every time anyone clicked on the About link on BookWormLaser.com, the 301 would redirect to this site.

This little issue is not that terrible until Google crawls the site and adds 800+ links to my About page. Once I figured out where the extra links were coming from, I was able to work around it but not fix it. That little error that I did to myself, drove my results down 20+ places earlier this week.

Something to think about before you go around and start redirecting pages without verifying the results, no matter how unlikely they may be.

Summary – The search for Alan Reeves

I’ve been able to make good progress since the start, going from #91 on 1-25-12 to #2 on 2-26-12 and to #12 today. I have learned a lot about improving search ranking and I have made a lot of mistakes, but it’s a learning process. Stay tuned to see if next week is the week I reach the 1st spot on Google and Bing.

If you only had time to do 1 thing to help your site or name rank better in Google, what would it be? Leave me a comment and let me know.