Vanity searches are searches one conducts on his/her own name. Apparently the practice is common enough to have a wikipedia entry. I consider vanity searches as the virtual equivalent of a credit check - to see what mischief is being conducted in your name, who is appropriating your content for their own use, etc.
In the context of web hosting, the vanity search is not personal, but professional - it aims to unearth signs of the site's popularity. One metric is the number of hits on a search using the site's URL. Another possible metric is the position of unique terms (used in the web site) in a search. Use quotation marks to ensure the search looks for the exact term, rather than for combinations of the individual words.
Another useful search strategy is to tracks inbound links, links to the site from other pages. To see how many other pages Google finds that link back to your Web site, just enter the phrase "link:" before the URL to your main domain. You can find out how many links there are, and also follow the results to visit the pages. You can also go to Google's Advanced Search page and enter your URL into the Page-specific tools, where you can seek links to the given page, or pages similar to it. The latter may give an indication of copycats - after all, copying is the highest form of flattery, remember?
So bearing all these tactics in mind, I ran searches for links: "gps.words2u.net", "www.words2u.net" and "blog.words2u.net", and also searched without the "link:" term and without the quotes. I also tested the advanced search page specific tools, which gave substantially fewer results. The good news - Google actually found some links. The bad news - they were all links I had generated when I posted questions, or sent emails which included my web site. The silver lining - after conducting these searches, there is no vanity left in me.
Some other searches: a search for the term "Costa Rican GPS waypoints, tracks, and useful location information" (entered without the quotes), does give my site as the top result. A search for "Costa Rican GPS waypoints, tracks, location information" does the same; "Costa Rica GPS waypoints" puts me as second place; "Costa Rica GPS tracks" has me at number 4. Now if only more people looked for Costa Rican waypoints or GPS tracks, my web site could be a hit!
On a similar trail, I looked for my blog in technorati.com. Again, the good news is they recognize my blog (blog.words2u.net). Alas, a search for "Costa Rica GPS Waypoints" returns some links to GPS devices, accessories and tricks, and even an article on 'How to measure for a proper fitting bra', but not my blog. This is probably because my blog does not yet have many references to these terms. By the way, anyone who need a GPS to fit clothing, is in serious trouble, but I digress.
And now to something completely different
I now redirect from www.words2u.net to gps.words2u.net, and renamed my index.php to index.php.replaced04092008, in case you are following the links from the previous blogs on home page design.
There are no comments for this entry.
[Add Comment]