What happens when you search Google for [your name]? Do you like what you see?
Part of that depends on your name. If your name is common (Joe Smith) or owned by a celebrity (if your name is Michael Phelps and you’re not a swimmer, good luck) you might be in trouble. For the rest of us, there are some things you can do to help.
Ed Kohler has just written an excellent post on the best ways to control the results that come up for your name. In a nutshell, you need to create accounts using your name on popular sites, then get them to rank near the top. In Ed’s case, he owns all of the top 10 results and 89 of the first 100. I own all 10 for my name, and 49 of the first 50.
So how do you do it? Between Ed and myself, our top 10 consist of pages such as:
The vast majority of those are sites that you can register for in under a minute. The more you can contribute to each site, the better. For example, if you have a lot of followers on Twitter, then you have a lot more links pointing to your profile (from your followers), thus raising your ranking for that profile.
However, even if you don’t have time to build each profile out, at least get registered, get your name reserved, and try to get back to it eventually. Building up your search results will take some time, so do it now while it’s not a big deal, and it’ll be ready for you if you ever need it (job hunt, etc).
After about a week in beta, WordPress 2.6.1 has been released. There aren’t any exciting new features, but it includes over 60 bug fixes.
You can download it here.
(via WPCandy)
It’s been a few months since they first announced it, but AdSense for Feeds is now available to all AdSense/FeedBurner users.
You should notice a new entry on your main AdSense page for “AdSense for Feeds”. To get started, you need to ask Google to manually tie your AdSense and FeedBurner accounts together. To do that, send an e-mail to adsense-support-aff@google.com and give them your Feedburner account name and the Google Account e-mail address that you use to sign into AdSense. I was bummed when I heard that it was a manual process, but they turned mine around in about 45 minutes. I’ve just added the ads to a few feeds of mine, so we’ll see how it goes.
The Google Operating System blog has more details (and screenshots) on how to get started.
I’ll post back with my results in a few days.
Geek Ramblings has posted that WordPress 2.6.1-beta1 has been released, with a variety of minor bug fixes. In particular, Dougal highlight the following fixes:
- Allow disabling password reset per-user.
- Query functions now allow a comma-separated list of post_status values.
- Several more link generation bits are made SSL-aware.
- Advertise the Atom 1.0 feed in the default theme.
- Atom API uses the newer WP authentication functions.
- Fix for an object caching bug in plugin updates.
None of those really excite me enough to upgrade to the beta version, but I’m certainly looking forward to getting my hands on the final copy of 2.6.1 when it comes out.
I apologize for not posting very much lately. I’ve been working with a handful of bloggers to try to get their traffic (and revenue) beefed up, and I’ve not had much time for this site lately. The techniques I’m using are really working quite well, and now I’m opening it up to other people. I don’t want to try to assist too many people (it takes a personal relationship with each blog), but if you’d like some help with your blog, let me know. Here’s the simple version of how it works:
- I manage your blog (WordPress updates, plugins, SEO tweaks, ad placement, etc).
- You continue to write your blog posts.
- I get a 25% split of your ad impressions.
To help explain this idea to potential clients, I’ve set up a simple site outlining how it works. The first question that most people have is: “Wait. I’m trying to earn more revenue, and I’m not sure I want to give up 25% of my revenue.” It’s a fair question. However, my clients (so far) have all been very pleased, as they’ve started earning much more than the 25% that I get. Here are some stats froma recent client I’ve started helping.
Those are genuine stats from Google Analytics, snipped just a few minutes ago. Each dot represents one week, leading up to last week.
The beauty of the revenue-sharing is this — you pay nothing. Nada. $0.00. Also, because I’m getting a small portion of the ad revenue, you can rest assured that I will work hard to get your blog running as smoothly as possible.
If you’re already WordPress-savvy and doing well, then you certainly don’t need my help. However, if you’re having problems keeping your site running well, or if traffic just isn’t increasing as quickly as you think it show, shoot me an e-mail and we can chat.
When Cuil launched a few days ago, one of the features they promoted is that they don’t store ANY info about searches performed on the site. Now Google has shot back by making their “customized results” a bit more transparent.
When you search, you might start to see a box in the top right corner that says something like “Customized for…”. Personally, I haven’t seen one yet so I’ll just have to show you the example photo they posted on the Official Google Blog:
They say the results are based on a few factors:
- Location: Using your IP address
- Recent searches: Not historical searches, but when you search one thing after another.
- Web History: If you’re signed in and you’ve enabled web history, it might use some of that data.
They make it clear that the results aren’t new — just more transparent. Good move, I think.
There have been arguments about this for months, but Google has finally made it clear — you are allowed to show ads from more than one AdSense account on a single page.
For revenue-sharing sites, it makes configuration much easier. Instead of having to make sure all of the ads on a page are from the same account, you can mix-and-match however you want. This has been the case since the last TOS revision back in February, but there has been a lot of confusion. Google simply wanted to make it clear.
Cuil (pronounced “cool”) has just launched today, and looks like it might be the first search engine in a while to give Google some competition. The main thing Cuil promotes is the size of it’s index — 120 billion pages, compared to the estimated 40 billion pages in Google’s index.
However, we’re not sure what to make of the “larger” index. For almost any search query, Google returns more results. If Cuil had a bigger index, wouldn’t it have more results for common words? For example, a search for “horse” on Cuil produces 128,400,000 results, while the same query on Google produces 322,000,000 results.
Cuil also seems to be having some issues with multi-word queries, but I’m sure those bugs will work themselves out. As TechCrunch said, “Cuil is only an hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search engine.”
TechCrunch has just hinted at a major search engine announcement next week. In this post, we read the following:
Google also says “But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine.”
That may be true today, but it probably won’t be true next week (check back here then). Google knows that as well as we do, and that’s why they posted this today.
Big news from Microsoft? Yahoo? Someone else? What do you think it might be?
Google has just announced that they are watching over a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) pages on the web now, which is more than double the number of stars in our galaxy!
The Official Google Blog has details and some history. Any way you look at it, that’s quite an impressive number. That leads to the next question — how many of those trillion pages are yours? Based on a “site:” search on Google (like this one), I’d say I’ve got about 500,000 pages in their index. I know I’ve got more pages out there, but that’s all that they’re showing. I would assume that their index has far fewer than a trillion pages, but they’ve not released numbers for that in quite a while. How many do you have in there?
