Posted on by drummonds

Gaming Google to Dominate the Drummonds

Six or seven years ago I became intrigued with becoming the Internet’s “Scott Drummonds”.  My Dad had called me up to brag that his home page ranked number one on Google, Yahoo, and HotBot, or some other engine BGE (before the Google era.)  I wasn’t sure how he had done it, but I knew that I wanted to do the same.  And why stop at number one?  Why not go for total domination of the top 10?  I’ve always been curious as to how this can be done.

Last week I joined some friends for a cool cerveza on Cinco de Mayo.  I discovered that the job of one of the guys at the table was online marketing.  As the hours passed and the beers evaporated, he shared a few tips from his full-time job of increasing online visibility.  He claimed that some of his steps resulted in about one job offer a month.  This means that the manipulation of your online profiles can be profitable, in addition to being bonafide nerd fun.

My goal in this game is to manipulate Google’s results to produce one unadulterated list of my pages in response to a search against “scott drummonds”.  The primary challenge posed to me is the result of Google’s attempt to reduce “drummonds” to a singular form.  This means that three particular Scott Drummond characters are weaseling in on my results.

The first step to increasing my online persona is to register as many online accounts as possible.  Here’s where I stand today:

Getting online each of these pages and a few more was easy.  Then adding links between as many as possible took only a few more minutes.  But apparently a key to succes at enforcing the connection between these sites is to include my name and descriptive text near the link or in the anchor text.  This helps Google recognize each link as being pertinent to this “Scott Drummonds” entity.

At this point I’ve developed a clique of self-referencing web pages.  But I need to start generating traffic to at least one of these pages.  That will increase that page’s importance in Google’s search engine which through a weak transitive property increases the ranking of all the other pages in the group.  So, how can I go about increasing popularity of one of the pages?

As it turns out, my role in marketing at VMware provides me with several opportunities to increase these pages’ visibilities.  Here are some of the steps I’ve followed that have increased the number of links coming into my clique:

  1. I’ve actively pursued contacts on LinkedIn to maximize my number of connections.  I’m currently at 100 connections.  I’m told that I need to continue doing this to the posted maximum of 500.
  2. I’ve posted videos on YouTube that are drawing a fair amount of traffic.  This is just lucky traffic for the purposes of this experiment.  The work videos are just for that so incidental traffic to the clique is serendipidous.
  3. I’m somewhat regularly writing blog articles on my work blog at the VMware communities.
  4. I’ve started Twittering my efforts on YouTube and my work blog, which pulls in more links to each of those sites.

All of these activities will increase links to at least one of the pages in the group.  There is a lot more I should be doing if I was taking this experiment more seriously.  For instance, every edit on Wikipedia produces a log that references the author’s personal page so the more edits I make there the more links I can bring back to the clique.  But I’m not about to go writing content on WWII any time soon so I’ll have to hope my work efforts draw incidental traffic.

The last advice that my friend gave me was to join and become an active member in the professional groups hosted on LinkedIn.  Not only can this be a valuable network for work activities but lists of the groups’ leading members are reprinted on sites outside of LinkedIn, which can multiply the number of pages that connect to the link.  Furthermore, external links coming into the clique are more valuable than links originating on the same site.  I’ve been poking around some of these groups recently and have actually found them pretty professionally valuabe, this little game aside.  But I don’t yet understand their use for increasing presence on the web yet.

I’ve been tracking the progress of these changes by the day since I met my friends last week.  I’ve already seen some pretty impressive shifts in the rankings on Google in the past seven days.  For some reason my LinkedIn page hasn’t been picked up by Google but I’m confident that its content will be sucked into into the nucleus soon enough.  As that mountain of digital threads is woven into my online fabric, I may see more changes to the ranking very soon.