Yesterday me and a colleague (David Walsh) began our SEO challenge. In case you missed it, the aim is to see who can get their website to appear higher than the other persons, when searching for our names i.e.
Search for David Walsh and get Cube Websites to appear higher than Chachakawooka
Search for Ashraf Vali and get Chachakawooka to appear higher than Cube Websites
Yesterday, I posted my original article, and within an hour my site was on page 11 when searching for “David Walsh”. In retalliation, David resorted to some dirty tactics, including altering all his page titles to mention my name, as well as putting a link to his blog post in his footer, with the text “Ashraf Vali”.
Despite his attempts to best me, he’s still failing. His blog post was made last Friday, yet even 5 days later it still hasn’t even been crawled by Google (compare to mine taking less than an hour!). The modifications to his page layout haven’t been crawled yet either.
No doubt today we’ll see some more poor techniques on his part to try and convince Google to show his site above this one for my name. Even if he does succeed, do bear in mind that unless he maintains the changes he’s made to his site (my name in all page titles, in the footer and generally spammed across his site) his ranking for my name will drop significantly as soon as he undoes his changes.
Morning Update
Since getting so quickly indexed and appearing on page 11 for David Walsh, my blog post now doesn’t seem to be showing on Google – a matter I’m still investigating. In the meantime, David’s own home page has slipped down from page 5 to page 6!
As well as SEO’ing each others names, we’ve agreed to extend the challenge to include “Ashraf Walsh”. After my blog post yesterday, my website appeared on page 2 on Google for that search term – so I’ve already won on that account.
Additionally, I was playing around on Google this morning, and found that my site actually appears second when searching for “Chachakawooka”, the only site beating it being chachakawooka.com itself which is understandable really.