Ponderings on search engines.

12th Aug 05

When this site went live it went straight to the top of Yahoo and position 4 on Google.

Both SEs also found old pages with dunk in, most were basketball sites (slam dunk) predictably and some were ancient pages etched into the SE's databases by the passage of time, and completely lacking anything about me or my name. Bizzarrely, there were some really tenuous leads like a page with a jpeg of a basket ball player, the file name had the word 'dunk' in it but there were no alt tags or text associated with the image, but for a while it still beat my main page in the listings! This is utterly crap and Google in particular was prone to this sort of error. for the first month, Yahoo consistantly gave more accurate results. Very often, both SEs found my old CV page which had nothing in the body about me, even when it was a genuine CV, just a title in the head code, and still, it is significantly above my index page.

Since this first month of reasonable results (I was there somewhere at least), it has completely dropped off the listings. I put this down to the search engine's attempts to remove spammy pages by checking their date of submission etc. New sites have to prove themselves by sticking around a bit. After which, the more they are updated the better. So I am assuming I haven't done anything wrong, and searches for Mark Dunk will yield this site at the top of the listings in the fullness of time. At the moment my best performing page is a detail page with 'Mark Dunk' in the title, a picture with good alt tags and one paragraph.

11th Oct 05

Well, that detail page and my CV (with nothing in it) has been at the top of Google for over a month now, but the index (home) page is on page 8 followed by this page. maybe Google thinks it is too spammy - too many references to my name? or prefers the files that are part of 'SpotlessMedia' which has been around much longer.

Yahoo on the other hand, put the index page right at the top where it should be! for about a month and then for no apparent reason it went to pos.23 or 10th if you use speech marks.

28th Oct 05

Whoo hoo! nearly there now. I have grabbed the top 4 spots out of 490,000 on MSN with the .name url right at the top, Google is listing three of my pages right at the top but still prefering those on Spotlessmedia.com and Yahoo is only listing the index page for markdunk.name right at the top. which is cool but I'm not sure what's wrong with the other pages.

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