Blogging RSS Orange

SEOContest2008

noreply@blogger.com (rssorange.com) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:03:50 -0500

As part of my efforts to get RSS Orange, up and known in the wide world, I came across a SEO contest run by a UK webmaster. The webmaster is offering a prize of $1000 to the website listed at the top spot on Google for the search term: SEOContest2008. As part of the minimal rules, the participants aren't to "play dirty" with any black hat seo, just some good ol' page optimisation.

Having only jumped in on it a week or so ago and with a closing date of the end of March, I am doubtful I can get any purchase on the rankings. That said, I have created a subdomain (http://seocontest2008.rssorange.com) and put up a page following a few fundamental white hat seo "tricks".

As yet no cached version but Google does know about it. After refining my searching to "SEOContest2008.rssorange", I found reference to the site from a back link. The back link being a result of having a displaypagerank.com button on the page.

Wonder if this page will get picked up...

RSS Orange Is On The Front Page Now

noreply@blogger.com (rssorange.com) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:33:43 -0500

After nearly 6 weeks in the life of rssorange.com, it has finally reached the top ten on Google for the search term "rss orange" (without the quotes).

It isnt the broadest of search terms I admit, in fact with the index page being "RSS Orange : Aggregation & Syndication of RSS Feeds" it should be nearer the number one slot. However, there are a number of other factors involved, including the fact that my level of inbound links and PR do not compare with the other sites ahead of me.

On a high(er) note though, a search on "rssorange" does bring me to the top of the list for the root domain.

Early days yet...

Site Disappeared But Back Again

noreply@blogger.com (rssorange.com) — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 10:36:23 -0500

In my last post, I mentioned that rssorange.com, had gotten itself listed on Google, the day after it had been registered. It was, however, a fleeting listing, as a couple of days later it dissapeared back into the ether.

Four weeks have passed since then & today I noticed that one page, the C/C++ rss feeds category page, has surfaced on the first page of Google for the search term "rss orange".

This reappearance (and appearance on the other major search engines) is undoubtably due to the crawlers finding inbound links to the site from a handful or so other websites that I have placed links on. In the majority, these have been directory sites that do not require a reciprocal link. These linked from sites appear to have been crawled recently and it has sent the search engine spiders in, en masse.

To gain intel on which spiders have been crawling, I haven't been trawling through the website logfiles, instead I have implemented a php script that sends me an email everytime a crawler visits. It is preconfigured to register the visits of the major bots but can be altered / added to if you want to monitor other spiders. This script (PHP Robot Visit) is a free download from stevedawson.com. Please do read the notes at the bottom of the information page as you will receive a lot of email - I received over 200 in 2 days from googlebot, alone.

Next steps are to find more choice sites to gain inbound links from & to work on refining the SEO techniques to get search results on broader search terms like rss, rss feeds, etc.

rssorange.com - up, running & crawled

noreply@blogger.com (rssorange.com) — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 10:32:57 -0500

rssorange.com is a website for syndicating RSS feeds & is a free service for site & blog owners to submit their feed links. Here is the link for the rss feed submission form.

The domain was registered on 13th February 2008 and by the next day, googlebot had visited the site and placed it in search results on page 2, based upon a search of "rss orange". How long this position will be held, or even if the results will stay in search at all, remains to be seen.

So, how did it get found so quick? I suspect it was via displaypagerank.com as a backlink was placed on their toplist page, in exchange for having code on RSS Orange displaying the pagerank (of course, pr is currently 0) .

Next steps are to promote, develop & monitize the site. Definately a lot of work to be done & we will see how the rankings & results look over the next few months.