Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. This is the 16th update. If you missed the any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 15th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 05-06-12 (click here to do your own search):
- #13 – My personal blog, BlueCapra.com, no picture??? (down 8 places from last week at #5)
- #23 – My Google+ profile with picture (down 14 spot from last week at #9)
- #25 – @bookwormlaser on Twitter ( down 2 spots from last week at #23)
- #27 – The About page on BlueCapra.com, no picture (down 3 spots from last week at #24)
- #31 – My profile on Vimeo – check out my video series Can You Etch It (down 6 place from last week at #25)
No Picture???
Last week, I discovered that my picture was no longer showing up in the results. I expect this is due to a change in the structure of the site, altering my permalink structure to remove the year and adding 301 redirect in my htaccess file. If this does not make any sense to you, don’t worry. Basically, I changed the address to all my posts. In doing that, I needed to tell Google that the old links should point to the new locations (via a 301 redirect). You do this by putting a line of code in the htaccess file on your webserver. For more information, check out this Wikipedia article on URL redirection.
I made the changes more than a week ago but it seems that Google is either still mad or hasn’t crawled the pages yet. To make sure you have your rel=Author tag and everything setup correctly, you can use Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool. You can see the results of my test at the top of the page. Everything appears to be right, but still no picture. This week I am going to do a little more digging to see what is going on with that.
Image Search
A check at Google Images showed my picture at #1 again and a total of 11 occurrences in the top 100 images. Showing up 1st in the image results has never been that important to me, but the result is more backlinks. I even found a few sites where some of the picture I have taken were reposted. I guess I need to start taking pictures again…
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 5 Bing results:
- #2 – My LinkedIn profile (no change from last week at #2)
- #20 – @alanreeves on Twitter (down 1 from last week at #19)
- #24 – The About page on BlueCapra.com (up 29 spots from last week at #53)
- #34 – My personal blog, BlueCapra.com
- #56 – @bookwormlaser on Twitter
Strategies for 1st
This week I commented on 7 posts as well as publishing 5 posts and a handful of pictures. I have been looking at ways to find more links and came across an older post that wrote about different directory submissions that resulted in links. I signed up for a handful of accounts and will be checking the links later in the week to see if any of them have popped up.
As with every week, I am searching for tips and hints that will help on my journey to be 1st on Google. Most of the techniques involving backlinks tend to be slow, with is painfully obvious since this is the 16th week update. Nevertheless, I am still pressing on.
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 #13. 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.
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