So I was viewing some of the logs for my main blog today and saw a visit from Google. I assumed it was probably a spider but when I focused in on it I found that it was actually the result of a search. Apparently people who work for Google use their own product. Go figure. 🙂 Anyway, what they were looking for was “schools kindle” and what came up number one was my blog. I tried a couple of other search engines and my blog didn’t show up on the first couple of pages of any of them. Weird. I’ still trying to decide if Google has it right and the other sites have it wrong or what. Open to opinions.
My default search engine is Live Search by Microsoft. I initially switched over when they started returning my web pages at the top when one searched for my name which people do a surprising number of times. I think they are looking for me but that may be a little vain. There are others out there including my father and son. In fact I have been contacted by people looking for both of them and not for me. I have a bigger Internet footprint. I have links to several of the members of my group and I see a lot of hits from people looking for one of them as well. It’s not as much as it used to be because they are getting more search engine attention as their blogs expand and as more people link to them directly.
Blogs are really powerful for search engine optimization. My personal web site was hard to find for the longest time. Once I started blogging and linked to my home page it rapidly climbed up the search results. If you want attention a blog (or two) is a great way to do it especially if you get people to link to you.
A while ago I tracked down solutions for an error that kept popping up. Every time it came up I did searches and seldom found anything useful easily. So I collected all the possible solutions for the things that might be causing it and I wrote a blog post about it. I included the full text of the error message and I get traffic to that post virtually every day. I think that creating a good solution with the right key words and you can really attract the search engines. A good thing I think.
Of course the power of blogs has attracted the notice of spammers. Those people spoil everything. Have they no shame? I wish there was a way to get to them and make them stop. Oh well.
I have a few pages that get hit fairly often. They’re mostly when I’ve blogged the answer to something I couldn’t find, such as the history_expire_days setting in Firefox that doesn’t behave the way you’d think. I have a page on listening to the Boston PD, too, which gets a few hits a week, even though several other more-popular sites have the same traffic. And my page on taking apart a Thinkpad T60.
But you’re right: spammers discovered the same thing about the value of blogs, and have been exploiting it for quite some time. Nofollow tags can help them from getting the “link love,” but it doesn’t stop them from trying, since they don’t bother to check if you use nofollow tags.