Experiment with on-line branding

My blog is now being scraped and used as link bait. I do not know if this is a compliment or not, but it shows the difference in visibility on myt blog since I started looking at this. My reputation monitor (on naymz.com) showed up a couple of blogs mentioning me. They were both named after celebrities. On closer inspection they were blogs being automatically created by scraping sites and they both automatically forwarded to a dating site. they had come accross my site, stolen the content and were using it to trap unwary people doing searches unrelated to dating. They then get paid per click for the useless traffic they are sending on to the dating site.

This is another frivolous entry caused by the search optimisation goal I have on 43 things (http://www.43things.com/things/view/1688159). This one is caused originally by me mentioning that I came up quite a bit if you searched for rufus web analytics on google. I said this was in part because Rufus was an unusual name and so it skewed the probabilities with respect to search. This was followed by Andy G saying that he would search on rufus sexgod and see if I came up. I said I doubted I would but didn’t think it was a hugely popular term so it might be possible to change that with a lot of work. I should never have said that. He has taken is as saying I might try to do the work to move “rufus sexgod” up in the rankings. I will clearly not do that level of work, but I feel the least I can do is put a page with the term “rufus sexgod” in on the web somewhere. My frivolous blog seems the sensible and safe place to put the term Rufus Sexgod, so here it is.

Rufus Rufus Sexgod EvisonReasonedRants.blogspot.com

This is the article I posted in the frivolous blog, cross posted here to test the effect.

What’s in a name?

I decided, for fairly frivolous reasons, to google Rufus and see what I got. I was expecting to see more of Rufus and Chaka Khan than I did. Clearly I am out of date. It was all Rufus Wainwright this, and Rufus Wainwright that. If I were after Rufus Wainwright MP3s I would have found them in an instant (or more likely an enticement to sign up for spam disguised as an offer of free MP3 tracks).

Rufus Sewell got a look in, as did Rufus King, Rufus Thomas, Rufus W Johnson, Rufus Stokes, Rufus Zyrtec (with a cool name like that you will get found on the web) and finally Rufus Shinra. Sadly no Rufus Evison (well not in the pages I bothered to go through. I guess in a way this is good news. I am not famous. I do not want to be famous. Even as a child I wanted to be rich and respected not rich and famous. I like to think that in my field, (web guru/web analytics/Internet stuff) I am fairly well respected, so I am happy.

Finally, hallelujah, something about Rufus the name. A link called Definition of Rufus. It was not actually a real page, just a broken link, but it was not about Rufus Wainwright! This gave me more satisfaction than I care to admit.

Interestingly enough I did see that a web design house in Sunderland owns rufus.co.uk which I had considered buying years ago before going for my surname instead. If they felt like selling it I would actually be interested, but I cannot see a company called Rufus selling a domwin name like that, even if they do not seem very good at Search Engine Optimisation (page 9?!?).

So, this article is perhaps of interest to anyone called Rufus themselves, but why would I bother putting it in a blog? Even a frivolous blog does not need so many examples from a google search. The answer is that I am doing an experiment in online branding (see ReasonedRants.Blogspot.com). This is part of why I am interested, but not the whole story. The rest is I am interested to see what affect putting all these Rufus references have on a page. It might even turn up on the search engines…

Rufus Evison
JustTheRants.BlogSpot.Com

As an Experiment I have added a page to my Frivolous Blog about googling Rufus. Putting it in here and cross posting will make Google notice it faster, so I will see what happens…

Rufus Evison
ReasonedRants.BlogSpot.Com

Even though I have left out all the tricks of the trade that involve work my blog has crept up to entries 13 and 14 if you google Rufus Evison (no quotes required). This surprises me as there is so much I could do to make the page search engine friendly and to get it more noticed.

Before I started this I could not find the blog even when I googled “Rufus Evison” together with unusual words that were in the blog. It has moved from being invisible to being on my first page with very little work. Admittedly I have a distinctive name so I am not competing against anything, but even so it should have taken at least a little more work.

If things progress this well in future I will find a harder search term (still relevant to me as I believe that good rankings require content that deserve them and try taking the blog up on that.

Suggestions for a term that described me in terms of my work or how I should be viewed on the web would be most welcome. Tell me how I would benefit from being viewed and if I agree I may try to arrange the web to fit {Grin}.

Rufus Evison
JustTheRants.BlogSpot.Com

When I posted this goal I had exactly one person who looked at my (previously pratically untouched) blog. Since then, just by keeping the blog at the front of my mind it has gained a few views. Next I will be restructuring my ‘blog space’ to take into account the few comments I have had. This will involve separating my rants from my reasoning as the posts as they are seem a bit too long and rambling. Also, though not through suggestions, I will link a blog from the goals on 43 things as well as dividing off a few blogs by theme. This will mean that posts to the whole will be at whatever rate but some blogs will be fairly neglected. That said it should mean that they are more targetted and that measurement of what people like is easier.

Suggestions welcome.

Rufus Evison
ReasonedRants.BlogSpot.Com