Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.This is the 78th update for my attempt to rank first for my name, Alan Reeves. If you missed any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 77th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 7-21-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):
- #1 – My Vizify profile – IT’S ABOUT TIME!!!!!!!! (up 13 places from last week at #14)
- #4 – My Blogger page (up 13 place from last week at #17)
- #5 – My Pinterest profile (up 14 place from last week at #19)
- #14 – My About page on BlueCapra (up 8 places from last week at #22)
- #16 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (up 8 places from last week at #24)
- #22 – Alan Reeves on Vimeo
- #26 – My profile on About.Me
- #30 – My profile on GoodReads
- #31 – My BrandYourself profile
- #39 – Book Worm Laser & Design on DailyMotion
- #42 – My profile on 48Days.NET
- #68 – My page on Weebly
- #80 – My Tumblr page
- #97 – My page on StumbleUpon
A check at Google Images showed my picture at #11 and a total of 7 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:
- #6 – My LinkedIn profile with picture (no change from last week at #6)
- #14 – My profile on 48Days.NET (down 1 place from last week at #13)
- #16 – My BrandYourself profile (no change from last week at #16)
- #21 – This site, BlueCapra.com (down 4 places from last week at #17)
- #25 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves (down 1 place from last week at #24)
- #45 – My profile on Quora
- #67 – My YouTube page
- #68 – The About page on my Quora profile
- #81 – Alan Reeves on Google+
- #83 – My recent post,Getting Started with QR codes – Make Your Business Cards Stand Out
- #86 – An old Google+ profile
This week I’m at #5 on Bing. Overall, my top 5 results increased 7 place with 5 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 11 times in the top 100 search results. You may notice a few extra results this week; I decided to go ahead and list all the results in the top 100.
A check at Bing Images showed my picture at #11 and a total of 4 occurrences in the top 100 images.
Strategies for 1st
I FINELY MADE IT!!! At least, part of the way…
This week marks the 1 1/2 year mark for my journey to be 1st on Google. I am happy to say that my Vizify profile showed up as #1 in Google. After 542 days, a profile that I built showed up 1st. That may not be an accomplishment to many people, but I’m about as happy as a pig in slop (to use a goofy farm saying).
Way back in week 37, my LinkedIn profile hit #1 on Bing for the first (and regretfully, only) time. Back then, I said that my goal is to have my own content at #1 on Google. So although my My Vizify profile is, at least temporarily, at the top spot on Google, my goal is to have this site at #1.
The search continues but I’m very happy with the results of the day.
In other news, my request to add the feed from this site to Alltop was accepted last week under the SEO category. If you are not familiar with Alltop, it is a site started by Guy Kawasaki, Kathryn Henkens, and Will Mayall. Of those, Guy Kawasaki has written several business books and was once the brand evangelist for Apple.
In terms of SEO, that is 4 follow links back to this site from a PR4 page. In the coming weeks, we should start to see the results and hopefully, they are positive and very powerful.
A look back at the past 18 months
Every six months, I like to take a look at the results as a whole. Graphs and charts are a great way of displaying the information. So, let’s look at what has happened in the past six months.
Here, you see the top few sites that show up most in the top 100 Google search results during the past 6 months. Interestingly, this site, BlueCapra, has shown up 24% of the time. The rest of the results are:
- BlueCapra: 24%
- Twitter: 23%
- Pinterest: 22%
- Vimeo: 18%
- Sites with less that 10 results: 12%
It’s interesting to see the top three results showing up almost the same amount as each other. Next, let’s look at the same time period for Bing:
On Bing, there were 6 sites with over 10 results each (compared to 4 on Google). They were:
- LinkedIn: 19%
- Twitter: 18%
- BrandYourself: 14%
- Facebook: 12%
- 48Days.net: 13%
- BlueCapra: 10%
- Sites with less than 10 results: 13%
Comparing all of the top results for both Google and Bing, only this site, BlueCapra and Twitter showed up more than 10 times in both lists. Now, let’s look at how the top results were by week:
As you can see, it looks like my Bing results are trending down while the past several months in Google has been very volatile, moving between 3 and 14 almost every other week. The start of the strange movement was before any of the Google updates as far as I can tell so I’m not sure why the results have been so wild.
Now that we have looked at the past six months, let’s take a look at the project as a whole, all eighteen months:
When looking at all eighteen months, BlueCapra stands out with the most results at 27%. Here are the rest:
- BlueCapra: 27%
- Vimeo: 16%
- LinkedIn: 13%
- Twitter: 12%
- Pinterest: 10%
- BrandYourself: 8%
- DailyMotion: 4%
- Sites with less than 10 results: 11%
Let’s look at Bing:
On Bing, the results are:
- Quora: 22%
- LinkedIn: 20%
- Twitter: 18%
- BlueCapra: 11%
- Google+: 9%
- Facebook: 6%
- BrandYourself: 6%
- 48Days.net: 5%
- Sites with less than 10 results: 3%
Again, the sites that show up on both lists are BlueCapra, LinkedIn, Twitter, and BrandYourself. Strangely enough, my Google+ profiles showed up pretty well in the Bing results (29 times) but not much on Google (only 5 times).
The final graph is the top result for both search engines from day one (at least, when I started tracking them) until today:
From this graph, you can really see the trends and how the results have changed over time. Next week I hope to go back and indicate Google algorithm changes on the chart for comparison. The big inflection points for Google were on 12/10/12 (big drop right above the G) and on 5/5/13 (the start of the wild ride to the top).
For Bing, there did not seem to be any major trending changes until 5/5/13 (same time as one of the Google inflection points). This leads me to believe that there was a change with the way both search engines looked at the same site. Since I doubt Google and Bing would ever get lucky enough to do the same thing at the same time, most likely it was a change in one or more sites that they look at for rankings. Of course, these are just my educated guesses.
One final thought; as of this week, I have 18 months of data where the search result and other variables has been about as consistent as possible. It will be interesting to dig a little deeper into the data in the coming weeks to see how much valuable information can be gathered.
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 #1 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 I can hold on to the 1st spot on Google and and reach 1st on 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.
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