Earlier today, my two positions were riding high, at spots 5 and 6. Now, I’m back down to 9 and 10. The Goog certainly works in mysterious ways.

Many SEOs will tell you it’s a waste of time to use Wikipedia as part of a link-building campaign; after all, the site nofollows all outbound links specifically to avoid being used as a tool by link spammers. However, I’ve long been of the belief that Wikipedia links still have intrinsic value, simply because so many people read Wikipedia; getting (and keeping) a link from Wikipedia can be its own reward in clickthroughs. There’s also the secondary link-building effect; visitors who follow links from Wikipedia may link to your content on their own after having read it on Wikipedia. With this in mind, I’m pleased to see that at least one external link to my content from Wikipedia appears to have paid off; I now have a secondary listing on the perton SERP for my entry on ASCII art, which was recently linked from the Wikipedia page on that topic. Of course, now that I’ve mentioned it here, the Wikipedia police will probably remove the link—unless, that is, they decide to click through and actually read my post, which is relevant to the topic, and seems fair to keep on the page.

I’ve dropped form 7th yesterday to 9th today, and from the Perton SERP, the reason seems clear: according to my listing, the title of this site is “Marc Perton,” and the snippet refers to this as “Marc Perton’s personal blog.” Yesterday, I appeared with more highly optimized title “Perton” and a snippet that explained the purpose of “Perton dot com.” The strange thing is, I haven’t changed my title or meta description since yesterday. That means, for some reason, Google is apparently referencing data from an older crawl, and penalizing me for it. That would jibe with Google Webmaster Tools, which claims that the site was last crawled on March 25th. Except that I know it has been crawled at least once since then, because the new title and meta description did appear in Google earlier this week. Truly strange.

One fascinating thing about this exercise is the window it opens onto the inner workings of Google. Because the Perton SERP is largely fixed—most of the top sites are rarely updated, and rarely get any new inbound links—the slightest change shifts the balance dramatically. Yesterday, for example, my blogger page on Engadget—which hasn’t been updated in two years—briefly surged from its current #10 spot to #5. Why? Apparently, because Engadget received a new perton-related inbound link, from this entry earlier this week. So, if my efforts here have helped Engadget, why haven’t they helped me? Largely because sites like Engadget (and Wikipedia, which remains ensconced above me) have massive credibility, and need very little to nudge them up in the rankings. This site, on the other hand, has limited cred, and is really only in the top 10 at all because it has a branded domain and longevity on its side. What all this comes down to is the need for a massive link-building campaign, which will probably be the focus of the remainder of this project. Stay tuned!

Late yesterday, I was up to #5, but as of this morning, I was down to #8 again. I’m not sure what’s influencing the rankings, since nothing has changed in the last 12 hours, on any of the sites listed in the top 10. No new inbound links, and no new content on any of the sites. The mighty G certainly works in mysterious ways.

Today I made my LinkedIn profile public; an easy way to get an extra inbound link, and LinkedIn’s authority seems to be on the upswing. There are also an increasing number of Pertons on the site. Looks like I’ll have to update ther Pertonverse links in my sidebar soon!

A bit of a setback today: I’ve actually dropped to 8th place, as Victor’s old site has suddenly jumped up ahead of me! I’m not quite sure how that happened; it’s certainly unexpected. Nevertheless, I will continue to plow ahead and do what I can to drive perton.com to the top!

Day 2: Fixed my metadata with All in One SEO Pack
I’m not a big believer in the power of metadata to influence ranking. But it’s one of those baseline things that you just have to get in line. and this plugin makes it pretty painless.

I’ve been doing a lot of SEO work lately, but one thing I haven’t been optimizing is this site. The result: Although I’ve owned this domain for 13 years, and have hosted a site of one form or another here for most of that time, I’ve now dropped to 7th position in branded search (a search on the word perton), behind not only the U.K. village of Perton and its associated Wikipedia page, but behind several institutions in that town, and even behind Victor! Clearly, something is wrong here! So, I’m issuing a challenge to myself: using all of the SEO tools at my disposal, I aim to improve my position during the next 30 days. Ideally, I’ll be in the #1 spot at the end, though I do know I face daunting odds. However, it’s not impossible. At the very least, I should be able to bump the Perton Middle School and Parish Council to lower spots. I’ll blog about my efforts here, and at the end of the month, we’ll see where I rank. And now, to work!

Day 1: I’ve added a byline to the template for individual posts.
This probably won’t help much, but it won’t hurt, and it’ll at least get my primary keyword into every single post on this site.