Hello TeamGateBar supporters. This is a last ditch effort to recover the top spot for the query rankmaniac colgate by tomorrow. We are posting our report for the competition and moving around some links. We shall see if our efforts succeed.
TeamGateBARBravo Alpha Romeo
Results at time of Report: November 22, 2011
Our Rankmaniac Coglate Mascot is the top result for a google image search (bonus points!)
http://rankmaniac-colgate.posterous.com/ is ranked 1st.
A link posted by our Digg account pointing to our posterous blog is 3rd.
A tumblr page containing links to our blog is 4th.
http://colgaterankmaniacbar.blogspot.com/ is 7th.
Initially we just wanted the blog to get listed for the query rankmaniac colgate. In order to achieve this we started creating links to rankmaniac-related web pages (to increase hub authority) and links to our blog (to increase content authority). On top of this we used Google Analytics tools to report the existence of our blog to the Google Crawler as well as use their SEO optimization suggestions, which we will discuss later on.
We started listing our blog in numerous blog catalogs in order to increase the number of links pointing to our blog. The rationale behind this is to mimic link spamming without the common negative results such as penalizing page rank or reported as spam. By advertising our rankmaniac colgate blog in these catalogs we were able to increase the number of in-links, as well as the number of page views, therefore increasing our page rank. Part of signing up to a blog catalog is including a link to the blog catalog. In order to not have our main blog pointing to them we modified their advertisement href link to include the “nofollow” attribute so that the crawler will follow that link and “leak” our page rank to that site. Another way we tried to improve/sustain the ranking of our rankmaniac colgate site at this point was through the use of social media websites, such as reddit, digg, tumblr, and twitter. At the time we thought this would provide us with more in links and thus more page rank. However, it turns out that posts in some social media sites do not count towards page rank. We still believe that it could give us more traffic and thus help establish our page as a rankmaniac colgate content authority.
The effect of social media on our page rank is hard to measure, but one interesting thing to note is that our tumblr account was listed before the main blog, counter to the original goal of using social media to boost our page rank. A few days after we created the site, it still had not been listed. We started posting content regularly in order to increase the rate of crawls through our page by Google. We thought that a higher crawl-through rate would improve our rank. On one day we had 5 posts in a 4-hour period. Mostly these posts had little content but included the keywords “rankmaniac” and “colgate”. In order to keep from being classified as spam we made up a thin context that would justify the use of those words and restricted the use of the phrase, “rankmaniac colgate” to a maximum of three times.
After a few text-only posts we began including posts with images. Some web searches implied including images and other media on our blog would make it it more valuable to users and would be weighed more heavily by Google’s algorithms and thus improve our ranking. The images had alt-text that contained the target keywords (aka rankmaniac colgate) so that the algorithms would identify them as being relevant to the topic. Alpha also created a rankmaniac colgate “mascot” for our page by editing an image in MS paint (if you can imagine such a thing). This gave us some truly unique content and it is currently a top result for the query “rankmaniac colgate” in Google image search.
The final optimization we performed at this point was the application of meta tags to our site. We added meta tags and a description to the site that we believed would help Google index our site faster and connect the site more strongly with the target keywords. It turns out that these tags are no longer considered by the algorithm.
Just over a week after we started our blog, it became the top result for the query, rankmaniac colgate. At this point we continued to post content to the blog in order to maintain our position. We also made some additional modifications to improve our page rank. First, we disabled comments to prevent spam from decreasing the keyword density on our site. There was not an issue with page rank “leakage” due to posting links because blogger automatically adds the “nofollow” attribute to all links posted in comments.
Suddenly we went from being listed multiple times on the top page to being removed completely from the top ten. Google webmaster reported that we had duplicate meta-tag descriptions. This was because we had added meta tags via blogger’s html templates; every single page had the same meta tag description regarding rankmaniac colgate. It proved extremely difficult to make custom meta tag descriptions for each page in Blogger, so we just removed the description.
After a few days with no results, we suspected that the keyword relevancy was too low. After all, we had just started posting things unrelated to rankmaniac colgate when the problems began to appear. We created numerous posts, carefully making sure not to spam the keywords. This had the opposite effect: we dropped even further. Google claims its top pages tend to hover at 2% keyword density and ours was erroneously high at 11% for the keyword “rankmaniac colgate” (as analyzed with an seo analyzer). The problem was compounded because of the archive widget on every page, which contained links to old posts containing the words “rankmanic” and “colgate” in their titles. After pruning the keyword density down to 2-5% still no results were found.
There is a fairly long delay between updating the site and Google updating its rankings, so nothing appeared to happen at first. At this point we also started to consider more ways we could optimize our rankmaniac colgate content for attracting page rank. On average, the top results of a Google query have ~600 words, so we thought that having longer content might help improve our rank (we know correlation doesn’t imply causation but...). We also found out that Google is able to track how long a visitor spends on a page among other statistics so we thought that trying to keep users on our page longer would improve our rank. To this end we started to embed videos in our posts.
On November 21st all of teamgatebar came together and overhauled the blog. We identified a major issue with our site structure. By having the blog archive as a widget on every single page, we had essentially created a clique of 28 posts. The crawler would bounce between all of these, diluting our page rank. We created a more reasonable link structure and embedded the archives at the bottom of the rankmaniac colgate history page. Google Webmaster also reported a 404, link not found, error which boggled our minds for a bit. We had deleted a double post at one point, but a link in the post still pointed to the url of the deleted page. We corrected this problem, but were beginning to worry that our blogger account was stuck with a penalty.
We had a rankmaniac colgate posterous account which we had set up in the beginning of the competition and were only using to occasionally advertise the blogspot blog. In case the blogger account couldn’t recover in time we decided to try and improve Google’s ranking of the rankmaniac colgate posterous blog by condensing all of our previous posts into one long post. It was a bit of gamble as we might set off the duplicate content sensors but because everything was in one long post about rankmaniac colgate chances were that we would be fine. Lastly we added a link to the posterous account to the blog template, trying to maximize authority flow from our blogger account.
The combined efforts met with great success, as indicated by the rankings described at the top of this report.
