Sid Sidberry Reads

So for most of this year I’ve been trying out new things, mostly to better understand how google’s changed and the impact of social media. Today I’ll admit it’s turned into a cluster cuss.

The Mission

The mission was simple, create a few sites, see how google see’s them, then see what effect twitter, tumblr, and youtube has. For this I used 4 domains, 8 tumblr accounts, 1 youtube, 3 twitter accounts, 1 facebook page, and way to much free time. The goal was to see which combination yielded the best results.

The End Result

Before going into details, let me tell you what got the best results. 1 static site, 1 wordpress with 2 year old content, 1 tumblr with occasional fresh content, 1 current blog, and one actively used twitter. Everything else… Well everything else was simply everything else. While in theory the other setups should have worked, they actually effected seo negatively.

The Goal

My goal was simple: See which formats / channels (yes I class things as formats / channels for all you social media “experts” & seo “mavens”)  were indexed the quickest and got me to the front page of google first. My secondary goal was of course to get certain keywords added to google’s historical index. [Side Note] I strongly believe historical data plays a factor in future seo results.

My 3rd and favorite goal was getting google to see me as someone else. I’ve been moving my personal stuff from greg sidberry to sid sidberry due to me and my father now working together at halfGray Non Profit.

Things to know

1. If your doing real seo, focus on what people are looking for to find you. Showing up #1 for funyuns is pointless if your selling anything other than funyuns and porn
2. Piwik has been pretty much FUBAR, so stat data is null
3. This is something I did for my own purposes, please don’t consider any of this to count as anything other than scientific wild ass guesses.

The Keywords

Yes I know I seriously aged myself by saying keywords, but when I started that’s what we called them: Keywords. It’s kinda like how social marketing one day transformed into social media. I’m damn near 30, I don’t care what you call it, only how it’s done.

The keywords for the 7 months of google play were: San Diego Fighter, Hi my name is Sid, Sid Sidberry (more on that later), San Diego Sid, San Diego Cakes, geek sometime ninja, and san diego kohana php.

Keyword: San Diego Fighter

San Diego Fighter was  by far the most successfully and fun of the runs. I used 1 tumblr consisting of original blog posts, rants, and a lot of fighting related video. A wordpress site was added just to keep everything interesting, with a twitter account fed from both of the channels and active use. The results were pretty good for some so low level.

On the social front I made contact with a number of local promoters / fighters, the account hit 30 followers, and the tumblr made 3-4 followers. While not braggable results, I consider them solid considering.

On the Google / SEO front I made it to the top 3 on both google and whatever bing was called before they switched to bing.

Why I think this keyword did so well

I was honest and passionate in my posts. I’ve long believed that the energy you put into anything will guide the results gotten. This was probably the only run where I actually invested myself. After this, I got kinda bored and geeky.

Keyword: Hi my name is sid

Now this was a no brainer, I pretty much owned the first page in google with a static site, tumblr, twitter, and wordpress. The problem however came when I began branching out into other tests. Suddenly I nolonger owned the search results. Hell at the time of writing this I think google by be pissed at all the ip and content changes. That said give me a few months to get my google results page back lol.

For those wondering why hi my name is sid falls into the no brainer category, look at the domain your on. I had a few things going for me:

1. my name, the double sid’s helped
2. the .com, hi my name is sid is a given to show up in search results
3. I forwarded the site I used when building my Greg Sidberry results.
4. Historical data, google already has alot of data relating Sid to my sites.
5. It was too easy

Keyword: Sid Sidberry

Ok now we hit the fun part. For years my father and I have had an seo battle over our name. If you’ve never had an SEO battle with your father, it’s awesome. Everytime I’d start feeling comfortable, confining him to the second page of results… He’d come back. This game has been going on since 2000-2001, and I felt it was finally time for us to use that energy somewhere else. The solution? I finally changed my name. While I’ve been known as sid for close to 7 years, I’ve worked as Greg to keep everything separated.

The first step of course was to get google to forget my facebook. That took 4 months. The next step was to transition profiles and sites to the new Sid Sidberry focus. Overall the hardest part was getting google to forget my facebook profile. The last steps are of course finishing this blog, and releasing about 2 years worth of tuts I’ve been saving up for just that reason.

Another step I took recently, was to create a funnel.

Why I created a Sid funnel

Sid the Science kid, I have no idea who he is, but your messing with my google results son. While I’ll admit I lose much of my dominance playing mt SEO games, he’s still pissing me off. I hated looking at the first page of results seeing 80% me and then like a nagging ex girlfriend: Sid the science kid. Hey Sid the Science kid, why are you on my corner?

So I decided to do something drastic: I made a Sid Funnel. 8 sites that highlight the word Sid. Not enough to get front page mind you, but when combined into a lifestream, I’m hoping it’ll give me the tool needed to blow Sid the science kid of my first page or results. Will update in a few months once everythings finished.

Keyword: San Diego Sid

To save you a long winded explanation: I just reused the San Diego Fighter setup, added another site into the mix, and changed a few titles. displayed in top 8 results.

Keyword: San Diego Cakes

This one didn’t go so well. It was a test run for a friends new site (ETA: Soon brooke, soon). The next run will cast a bigger net and focus more on a mix os local / social with a much stronger SEO push.

Keyword: Geek, Sometime ninja

Geek, Sometime ninja is actually a historical term, but I wanted to see if my beliefs on historical data were sound. End result=yes. IT took no time at all to get relisted under this term. All i did was cange the title of the site with the keyword in googles historical data.

Keyword: San Diego Kohana Php

This keyword was a headache. Hands down my least favorite of all the runs. Why? because I did this test with 1 tumblr, 1 static site, 1 twitter, and even then i didn’t get ranked. I’ve figure out how to get the results I wanted, but by then it wasn’t worth wasting more time.

What I learned

I’m currently in the middle of wrapping up all my little experiments and turning my focus back to code, HA, and the cloud. In retrospect these experiements helped me better understand tumblr and gave me some additional wisdom on twiiter. However if there’s anything I’m taking from all this, it’s that content is still king. No matter how many tricks you pull (No I didn’t use black hat seo, but I may use some in a future test) your content will in the end determine your success.

Randomly cool stuff

I ran alot of tests. If you follow me on twitter, you probably noticed the 3 floods, etc. In my testing the best way to rapidly get followers is to flood your stream, and hash tag for no good damn reason. This however completely defeats the point of using social as the majority of your followers will not be the quality followers your searching for.

Also use quotes. Quotes are like twitter crack. For one test I simply fed in a rss of twitters search results to a wordpress blog, then had that blog feed back to twitter. I got 20 something followers and 12-16k click throughs in 48-72 hours. WTF! Yeap tweople love quotes.

I still have about 5-6 tests left before wrapping all this up and will most likely post an overview. The one I’m looking for however is whether beauty, nudity, or fashion gets the best results. 3 blogs, 3 categories of content, only 1 can win

Thanks for all the fish,

Sid Sidberry

A new version of swf address is out

The new SWFAddress has just arrived after seven months of active development, various contributions and lots of positive feedback from the community. The list of changes includes the following:

* Refactored JavaScript implementation
* New SWFAddress.swc AS3 component
* New CS4 based Splash screen sample
* New Digg API sample
* New up() method for easier deep linking path navigation
* New XSS protection that doesn’t affect special characters
* Support for Internet Explorer 8
* Support for custom HTTP status messages in the SEO sample
* Improved title handling
* Improved unload event handling for IE
* Updated Rails sample
* Fixed getBaseURL() for AS3
* Fixed Safari 2.0-2.0.3 support
* Build-in fix for the Firefox 3/Mac OSX blinking effect
* Additional onLoad fix for application/xml content type
* Fixed optional options parameter for the popup method
* Cross platform build script
* Various optimizations

Asual | Blog – SWFAddress 2.2

Yes, I know there are much more great FireFox plugins but I am sharing only those I am using myself and find really useful.

Before I start, here is an overview of what I am going to talk about:
SEOQuake Any page instant SEO analysis
SearchStatus Google, Alexa, Compete Rank Toolbar
Google toolbar Google search and suggestions
Rank Checker button Instantly checks a site SE rankings
User Agent Switcher Change the user agent
SEO for FireFox Exhaustive SEO analysis within search results
Compete.com Site traffic information
Web Developer Instant access to image and link information
Page Age Get the page age

9 SEO FireFox Plugins I Can’t Live Without

ted to find myself thinking really weird whenever i spaced out. at first it seemed like i was thinking about seo algorithims, but then as time progressed and i let my mind roam more it started to appear like search / indexing algorithims.

Needless to say this was all out of my range of knowledge. So i was kinda freaking for a bit like: umm i think i’m going crazy, because i don’t know how the heck this is making sense. about a month into this i was actively letting my mind do its algorithim thing about once every other day and trying to figure out how to apply them to stuff. 2 months into it i contacted a friend of mine who knows a bit about stuff like this because i was starting to think i might just be crazy and looking to much into mental gibberish. My homegirl quickly told me, not only was i not crazy, but there’s ton of people who write on the subject.

fast forward 4 months later, I’m not doing the algorithim thing as much, but i’ve been looking around the net to figure out how they could be used. I’m supposed to be meeting with a friend of a friend who develops encryption algorithims to see if any of this makes sense to him, but today i came across the netflix algortim project while looking for the netflix video rip project.

turns out theres something that all this applies to: Machine Learning. So it looks like it’s time to finally head back to school, because i’m gonna have to do alot of learning to understand all of this. But hey maybe 20 years from now i’ll be one of the few web developers with a dual degree in graphic design and ai – lol.

Oh yeah on the note of school, i’m gonna start looking in la, once i’m settled, for weekend classes in graphic design. anyone know any good spots for me to start learning about ai (non web)?

ai coder idea

Machine learning – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

elsid out

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I’m getting more into seo, and found this article by Mike Davidson a great read. Hopefully my repeated use of his name, helps him with his google goal

My favorite comedian of all time, the late great Mitch Hedberg, once told a joke about what he called “The Roundabout AIDS test.” Click Mitch’s mouth below to hear it:

While obviously not meant in any serious manner, the joke reminds me of my attitude towards SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization”. A lot of people spend an inordinate amount of time making sure all of their pages are specifically geared towards achieving a high ranking on Google. While I understand the business objectives of such an obsession, I find my own attitude towards SEO much more apathetic. I’m a lot more interested in how many people subscribe to Mike Industries than how many people typed in something like “expiring domain” and somehow ended up at my site.

Mike Davidson – Lessons From The Roundabout SEO Test

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so far this karma seo experiment i like to call my blog has been going well. For those that don’t know this blog is an experiment. I believe that if you give back, you’ll be ok in life. so i’m trying this on the net.

so far so good, all my love comes from search engines, so this month i’m gonna step up my game a bit, and try to post as much helpful info as possible, in hopes i’ll finally push past 4500+ hits.

guess that means less sleep, and alot of sanitizing code

currently working on posting an existing drupal site to friendly urls, heres the first round of info

mass url aliasing : http://drupal.org/node/23708

pathauto : http://drupal.org/node/17345

path redirect : http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect

global redirect : http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect

reading material

drupal discussion : http://groups.drupal.org/node/2222

path patch : http://drupal.org/node/147143

issue topic : http://drupal.org/node/100835

well search tagging is now off, i’ll have to clean up the posts and find a user tagging function, but hey thats life

we’ll my little seach to tag conversion experiment is failing. people are clicking on links that have nothing to do with their search terms, which is leading to tags on unrelated posts, which in turns screws up the whole using tags and search for navigation.

Well at least theres always the archives.

another week, then i’ll probably have to kill it.

-sid