Digitally Refreshing

I arrived in Vegas a few days before the MIX09 conference so I could revisit my birth country (my family and I left when I was 9) and take in a few of the sites.

Sunday was spent on an Adventure Photo Tour which was a great sightseeing opportunity but hardly a ‘Photo’ tour as the website suggests. Pitching up with my Canon 5D and tripod must have seemed odd to the camera-phone wielding group. I charming couple even asked me how to switch off the flash on their automatic so it wouldn’t startle the helicopter pilot.

Monday and Tuesday were really exploratory days. Me, with camera, on foot. The sun was out and it was hot, I mean really hot, so my bar stops were many and quite frequent. This obviously took it’s toll on me and I spent the rest of the week alcohol free. Probably a good thing as then I could focus on MIX09!

The conference

Watched a great opening presentation, setting the pace and excitement for the next three days. I especially liked Bill Buxton and all his energy. Stack Overflow (a bit like a Yahoo! answers for programmers) is technically great and a fab resource too. Netflix showed just how good Silverlight can be. And if you’re still not convinced take a look at the Rolling Stone back issues site (not live yet). Great design and love the way it feels.

See Expression Blend in action, from concept to production. Need too many words to explain, so just watch.

At the end of a long day I attended the launch party at TAO, where I met some great people – mostly Microsoft partners, all out to have a good time and talk about technology.

Friday was probably my favourite day. This was down to fascinating presentations by Luke Wrobleski (I even bought his book) – Web form design and Dan Roam – The way of the whiteboard.

Both sessions were packed full of great ideas and examples that I can bring back to PruHealth and PruProtect and implement on our sites.

Overall the conference was great, the venue fantastic and the people, both presenters and attendees friendly and interesting. I’ll definitely pester my boss for the budget to go again next year!

And finally, a big thanks to Conchango for inviting me!

Further reading and viewing:
A list of all speakers

Check out some photos taken at MIX09

Titles like that just don’t make sense, but from an Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) point of view, it works just fine. There is a compromise between hitting the number one spot on Google and creating a site that’s readable and usable.

Through good SEO techniques I managed to get www.petereed.co.uk on the first page of Google, then it completely disappeared from Google and now I’m scaling the rankings once again – trying to get to the illusive number one spot. This is what I’ve learnt …

(please note: I’m refering to the .co.uk version of each search engine unless specified otherwise)

Everyone wants their site to be number one on GYM (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search). But the first question you should ask is ‘For which search terms?‘ – this is massively important. For example, if you search on ‘orange‘ (without the quotes) in Google you’ll never find Digitally Refreshing, however if you search on ‘orange broadband‘ (without the quotes) then Digitally Refreshing appears on page 12. If you search on ‘orange broadband sucks‘ (without the quotes) Digitally Refreshing rises to number one.

I wanted petereed.co.uk to hold the number one position in Google when the term ‘pete reed‘ was searched on, so I made sure that I covered the basics by placing the term ‘Pete Reed‘ into:

Home page content
Home page title
HTML title tag
HTML description tag
HTML Keywords (Google stopped using Keywords for search years ago)

I also blogged about petereed.co.uk, linked to his site from mine and correctly key-worded my article. I also made sure that every other rowing site in the UK and abroad knew about his site and also linked to it. This is of course a slower process as you’re inevitably relying on others to promote you. I also made sure that Pete Reed’s Wikipedia entry contained a link to his site.

Pete Reed’s site shot straight to number 1 in Google for about a day. I’ve noticed this behaviour many times with sites I’ve built but they soon drop down the rankings again. Pete Reed’s site settled at around 12th place and worked it’s way up to around 7th and that’s where it stayed for about a week.

Barriers blocking a number one spot were ironically Pete himself. Pete had written many articles on many different websites, he was also written about regularly. So straight away I was dealing with a mass of high trafficked, well linked, established sites. How could Google know that Pete’s own site should appear at the top of the results page? Google ranks on relevance and this is why the likes of his own Wikipedia page and other Rowing sites were outstripping my efforts. For a while even my own post was ranked above his site.

Not content with this position I started to tweak the content, insert more keywords, create another well worded heading and edited the HTML title of the site. I would have used more keywords but the owner of the site wasn’t happy with the aesthetic of the content – which is fair, you have to appreciate the balance between SEO and usability as illustrated in the first paragraph of this article.

I also submitted a sitemap to Google using a free tool supplied by 1&1.

To my great disappointment Pete Reed’s site then dropped to around page 4 of Google and then suddenly disappeared from Google altogether. I knew it had been removed from Google because I made use of the webmaster tools provided by Google themselves.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Peter Reed’s site was still holding number one spot on Yahoo! so what was going on with Google?

Now, as I don’t know how Google really works (no-one does despite what people may tell you) I can only begin to guess at what may have happened and I’m pretty sure I screwed things up when I submitted the site map.

Google doesn’t do duplicate content. If you were to duplicate the content of someone elses site Google will simply ingore you (or the original site – which is a disaster). Pete Reed has two domains, petereed.co.uk and the domain he registered first – petereed.org. So, Google naturally crawled the .org version and then I submitted a site map for the .co.uk version creating a problem.

Or so I thought. As it turns out this wasn’t the problem as after a few days of Pete’s dissappearance it reappeared in Google’s index. So, Google has quite happily indexed both domain versions of the site:

Go to Google.co.uk and search on the following terms:

site:petereed.co.uk
site:petereed.org

You’ll see that Google now contains many pages from each ‘version’ of the site (with the number of pages growing steadily).

So, was this dissappearance just a glitch in the matrix? Did Google make a mistake which it then rectified a few days later? Or perhaps submitting a site map for a Joomla installed site using a different domain to the domain which the site was installed into is simply a bad idea?

What ever happened as of the date of this article www.petereed.co.uk is ranked number one in Google.co.uk and 4th in the .com version. But, remember it won’t stay that way forever – as soon as a site becomes more relevant Google will demote you.

Now the next challenge, to become number one ranked site for the search term “olympic rower“.