1st on Google – Week 4

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google. If you missed the first few posts, you can find the first one here, 1st Week Update here, 2nd Week Update here, and 3rd Week Update here. Below are the results as of Sunday, 02-19-12 (click here to do your own search):

• #2 – My LinkedIn profile page (Up 9 places from last week at #10)
• #10 – The About Me page from my personal blog, BlueCapra.com, with picture (Up 15 place from last week at #25)
• #71 – My review of 48 Days to the Work You Love on GoodReads.com (down 27 places from last week at #44)
• #72 – Comment I made on AndyTraub.com 2 months ago (down 11 places from last week at #61)
• #76 –BlueCapra.com tag page; posts tagged ‘Alan Reeves’ (down 3 places from last week at #73)

This week was mixed for my journey to 1st on Google. Within the first five search results where I appear, I jumped up 9 places to #2 and overall, I decreased a total of 17 places. Last week I increased a total of 40 places with the top spot at #10. The closer I get, the harder it will be to get there. Overall, I show up 6 times in the top 100 search results.

Several of the results were completely new to the list, such as #71 and #76, while a few dropped off. It is hard to say why some results show up higher one week and lower the next. Three of the top five results were consistent from last week. It is good to see this site, BlueCapra.com, showing up twice on my top five results.  I am surprised to see my LinkedIn profile jump from #25 last week to #2 this week but I am happy that I made it to #2.  Having two results in the top 10 is also pretty cool.

The search was performed on my work laptop after I had cleared the cache, browser history, etc. To do the search, I used Mozilla Firefox. The search setting I used was similar to the first weeks (cleared cache, 10 search results, non-instant results, strict filtering, etc).

Strategies for 1st

My main strategy, up to this point, has been commenting on blog posts when I have a relevant comment, not “Great post” or something like that.  I believe that strategy works, but with the information I have recently learned, I am less confident it is working well.

Commenting on blogs often provides back links (that is, links back to your site).  The information I learned recently is that most of the comments on the web (and probably all of the ones I have made), are given the NOFOLLOW attribute.  The NOFOLLOW attribute instructs search engines, when looking at a page, not to follow that particular link.  This was done to help stem the tide of spam comments; if the links are not followed, there are no (or at least, fewer) rank benefits.  This doesn’t prevent comment spam, but it does help.  Other services such as Disqus or Livefyre help from what I have seen.

Does NOFOLLOW count toward 1st place?

According to what I have read, the NOFOLLOW attribute impacts search ranking but it is not very clear how much it affects Google. A really good article from the Search Engine Journal ask the question of how Google treated NOFOLLOW to a variety of people.  The consensus, as far as I gathered, was that no one really knows.  There are a variety of metrics that Google uses and although no NOFOLLOW links are crawled by Google, that doesn’t mean that the link text and the link itself are useless.  We just don’t know for sure.

Building back links is not the only benefit of leaving relevant comments; it gets your name out to the public as an expert or competent source.  If you are leaving good comments, relevant opinions, and useful information, people will begin to see you as an expert and start to click through to your site.  They read your posts and start to follow your work.  They then begin to link to your site on their blogs and sharing your posts on social media.  NOFOLLOW means Google does not crawl the page, not that the link is useless.  Regardless of how Google treats my comments, I continue to read and comment on blogs.

Any comments?

This week I have commented a bunch of times on 7 different blogs. This week was a little different.  I was fortunate to have a product I created, the MeTag™, featured by Justin Lukasavige on CoachRadio.tv.  He shot a video and hosted a give away of a MeTag or two for the best comments.  That day the traffic spiked to my business site, BookWormLaser.com.  I’ve heard that among the many ways to get traffic, hosting a give-away works really well.  From experience, I can tell you that it works really well.

I continue to produce content on my personal blog three times a week and on my business blog (BookWormLaser.com) at least 5 times a week. Each post provides a link with the link text of my name, pointing to either my author page (BookWormLaser.com) or my About Me page on this site. These links are not given the NOFOLLOW attribute and help with my Google ranking.  It would matter more if my sites were considered an authority, but hey, that is what I am trying to establish.

On Saturday, I was catching up on my RSS feed and read a post by Neil Patel about rank improvement strategies.  It was very insightful and full of great information.  The strategies came too late for this week but I hope they will have an impact in the near future.  Basically, the two strategies:  link to authoritative sites in the same blog post as a link to your site and promote blog posts from other sites linking to your site using specific anchor text containing the key words you are interested in.  The article does a terrific job at explaining the concepts with examples.

Blogs I have commented on during the past week

CoachRadio.tv – Sound Deadening for Podcasting: Do You Need It?

AndyTraub.com – How to avoid a pathetic existance

LifeOptimizer.org – 10 Habits of Exceptionally Healthy People

CoachRadio.tv – 177 – Email Subscriptions: Feedburner vs Aweber

CoachRadio.tv – How Would You Use a MeTag™?

The Simple Dollar – Jobs and the Entrepreneur Mindset

48 Days – Want a brighter future?

JoelRunyon.com – If You’re Scared To Death, You’re Doing It Right

48 Days – The Incompetent Interviewer

Expert Enough – Ask the Readers: Do You Think the 10,000 Hour Rule is the Only Way to Become an Expert?

Expert Enough – This Economist Thinks Listening to Experts Can Be Dangerous. Do You Agree?

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 #2 on 2-19-12. That’s an 91 place improvement in only 25 days. In all fairness, Alan Reeves is probably not the most sought after keyword on the internet. Nevertheless, the concepts can be used as building blocks for your own SEO journey.

CCheck out next week’s update – Week 5

(photo by: photostock)