I broke into the top 100 search results in MSN today. I’m now showing up number 85 for Nelson James. No, that’s not the greatest accomplishment in my life, but it’s definitely a start of something good to come. Still no sign of search banter showing up for Nelson James in the other search engines.
It sounds like Chris Payne, corporate vice president of Windows Live Search (formerly known as MSN search), is going to leave Microsoft and start up his own business. I don’t know whether his new business will be in the same industry or not. Regardless, this appears to be another huge blow to Microsoft in the search engine industry. They were already on a downward trend in search engine market share and I don’t think this is going to help much. It’s hard to beleive that Microsoft, a corporation which has virtually monopolized the computer industry, is suffering badly in an area you would expect them to dominate in. It will be interesting to see what happens here.
I am performing a new test: Starting today, I am going to attempt to show up for my name: Nelson James. This may actually be quite difficult since there are 52,300,000 sites that show up for that keyword phrase in Google alone, but I’m up to the task. I’ll be competing against an australian rock band “Nelson James” (of which I was not named after), a professional sailor/writer, a Stanford University Lab, an associate professor of psychology (who has his name entirely backwords), an acclaimed nature photographer, some crappy photo.net page, and finally a website that is temporarily down.
I purposely named this post Nelson James because I have created my blog so that the title of the post is in the URL of the page. Also, if you haven’t noticed, I have made sure that my keyword is the most prominent thing on this page. It’s my title, it’s italicized, and it’s mentioned a few other times. I think that should do the trick.
I am hoping that it will only take a month or so to show up for Nelson James, but you never know. I’ll keep you posted on the progress.
Business Opportunities created an interesting little applet that looks at the value of each link to your blog and then computes your blog’s worth using a link to dollar ratio such as the one AOL-Weblogs uses. Right now, my site is valued at $5,080.86, but with the way things are going, that will change very quickly so to all of those investors out there, get it while it’s cheap! I’ll sell for nothing less than the price it’s listed for (I even want the 86 cents).
Oh, and I don’t think you can find the dollar amount of anything else but a blog in there, unless Google.com is really valued at $0.00 (of course I tried it).
Have you ever wanted to see how many pages of your site the search engines know about? If so and you haven’t heard about the site: command, read on…
Go to any one of the top 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and type “site:yoursite.com” and hit enter. Make sure you don’t put any spaces between any of the characters there and that search engine will pull up a list of all of the pages of your site it has indexed…supposedly…
On the official Google Webmaster Blog a few days ago, there was a post saying that this site: command doesn’t always pull up a full list of results from the search engines. It sounds like Google is working on this right now and this should be fixed within a couple of weeks so that it shows all of the pages of your site that Google has indexed.
Why Would I Use the Site: Command?
It’s nice to know how many pages of your site have been indexed by the search engines. If you have created new pages in your site, you can use this command to see if and when they get indexed.