Last week, I wrote about using link-love as part of an exercise to improve our blogs’ search engine rankings. I thought I’d go back today and do the same searches to see if it had any impact. It has.
My ranking on my blog identity – Ant’s World – was already pretty high before the exercise. I’m still second on Yahoo and I’ve climbed from ninth to sixth on Google.
The search results on my name – Anthony Hazell – were markedly improved. My blog now comes up on the first page of Yahoo, the eighth link, while it’s climbed from being completely buried (I stopped looking for it after five or six pages) to being 25th (i.e. on the third page) on Google. This obviously still needs to be improved on.
However, the links to my career history also improved a bit (whether my links had anything to do with it, I have no idea), and still rank above my current work. The paper I published in a scientific journal now comes up first on Google (it was second last week), and the first link that refers to me, rather than another Anthony Hazell, is second (up from fifth) on Yahoo.
(Notice how I included Anthony Hazell twice in this post without trying to manipulate the search engine algorithms? Too much? 
)
A quick Postscript:
Rather embarrassingly, given the theme of my blog, one of the links that comes up quotes me as deputy communications director for the DA giving pretty low priority to online communication during the 2004 general election.
On the other hand, it shows how far we’ve come in three short years
I love your blog. You have some very interesting reading, I hope to see more on your blog. very nice.
Thank-You