Having uploaded my search engine optimization advice to my webserver on June 19th 2005 I felt both an obligation and a curiosity to see just how that page and other pages I had put up recently actually performed. As I am currently an MBA student at the Sauder School of Business, the most recent additions to my webpage consisted primarily of pictures and stories about me and my classmates.
Although I could have monitored big tits or Vancouver hotels those keywords are both exceedingly competitive and don't accurately reflect the contents of my website. However should a random websurfer type in Marlene Lau or Gary Lau and end up at my website they shouldn't be too disappointed as there actually is some information and images of them as well as other classmates in my MBA photo gallery and other places.
The classmates where chosen using my own peculiar system which mainly consisted of the classmates I had already uploaded pictures and stories about. As I have over 100 classmates and I'm slowly adding more content such as this page additional classmates who indulge in self googling could find their way to Muschamp.ca
First among classmates on more than just this trivial webpage, Marlene is pictured twice in my MBA Gallery and twice during my ramblings on image search engine optimization. As a result of this my website has been number one in Google for Marlene Lau for some time. She used to be in an all female band back in Calgary called Honeyrocket which is another phrase that has appeared in my logs lately. I must have done a pretty good job using the Rule of Five and optimizing other onpage factors as I doubt I have any inbound links with the anchor text "Marlene Lau".
Image searching, at least on Google, uses a different spider. This bot is less active and Google's image index is updated less frequently. So despite having at least four pictures of Marlene on my website none of them are currently (as of June 24th) indexed by Google. So as a further experiment I recroped and renamed mbaClassmates.jpg to frankMarleneAndGary.jpg to see which image will end up in Google's index first.
Gary pictured at right with Marlene and Frank Huang is another classmate who has been frequently mentioned recently on my webpage. Despite all these mentionings none of my webpages rank particularly highly for Gary Lau. As I mentioned previously, the fact that Lau does not appear in the title or body text on this page, contributes to why my website ranks higher for Marlene Lau. This page is an example of poorly chosen anchor text.
Chinese surnames such as Lau are very popular. Since it appears it is easier to rank higher for Marlene than Gary Lau it can be inferred that Gary is a more popular first name than Marlene. I'm not sure whether Man Yee is more popular than Kayen. Man Yee and Kayen are Marlene and Gary's Chinese first names respectively. Thank goodness their last name isn't Zhang, that is the most popular Chinese last name.
Tracy Yang is another of my classmates of Chinese ancestry who has been mentioned in stories and pictures on my website. A quick Google for Tracy Yang did not reveal my MBA photo gallery as the number one result. Part of this is to due with the fact that Tracy Yang is a more popular two word phrase in Google than Marlene Lau but not Gary Lau. The other factor working against me is the fact Tracy Yang does not appear in the title nor in the H1 tag. This is because when I put up my MBA Gallery it wasn't solely for the reason of ranking highly in Google for my classmates names. On June 24th Google searches for four of my classmates revealed the following:
| Classmates Name | Pages in Google |
|---|---|
| Marlene Lau | 50,300 |
| Gary Lau | 498,000 |
| Tracy Yang | 288,000 |
| Anni Cao | 21,600 |
Anni Cao is another Chinese classmate whose name and picture appear on my website. Unlike Tracy and despite her name not being in the title nor the H1 tag I managed to easily rank first in Google for the phrase Anni Cao. This is because there are approximately 260,000 less pages in Google with the words "Anni" and "Cao" than the words "Tracy" and "Yang". Andrew Kuo also came to my house for Thanksgiving but his name is more popular in Google than Anni Cao so my story doesn't rank as highly for his name. Once again this shows that without the benefits of incoming links and keywords appearing in the title and H1 tag it is difficult to rank highly in Google.
I have classmates other than the four mentioned above and some of them are even not Chinese. Pictured to the right is the inexplicably popular Ines Biedermann, which astute readers will recall is my most popular classmate in terms of search queries in June 2005, and the very sociable and highly photogenic Wendy Chang. Seeing how popular of a last name Chang/Zhang is, I don't hold out much hope of ranking highly for it.
Chris Kerluke another non-Chinese classmate is an example of phrase for which my MBA photo gallery ranks first. Kerluke must not be a very popular last name as less than 500 pages were returned for Chris Kerluke in Google.
In another picture, taken at an MBA event I was forced to miss due to personal problems, are Irene Leung, Josephine Man, and the omnipresent Wendy Chang. These three lovely ladies could have helped me, perhaps they still can. Alas:
Another picture, this one contains: The Mighty Mighty Marlene Lau, the eminently electable Tracy Yang, and that dynamic Dane Sverre Panduro. One other mysterious person is pictured. See all the shiny happy MBA students, smiling, laughing at an MBA event.
"Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to endless night."
-- William Blake
Now we wait for the bots. One additional piece of advice for monitoring keywords in Google is to use Google Alerts. If you follow the latest advice on Googling your own name regularly, you could set up an Alert to do it for you. If you do use an Alert I recommend you use quotation marks to reduce false positives. Personal branding is all the rage, don't cha know.
As I'd prefer this page to not rank highly in Google as it is not part of my MBA Photo Gallery I'm only going to link to this from my search engine optimization page. This plan had to fall by the wayside due to the addition of a Site Map to Muschamp.ca, after that I decided to link to this page because I have nothing to fear from the truth, something not everyone can say. This was an example of concentrating PageRank. I wonder what Marlene and Gary think of all this? I guess they would rather hang with the ever charming Frank Huang than yours truly. To be fair to Marlene and Gary I haven't heard back from a lot of classmates I've emailed since the end of the period three. Oh well maybe they'll write me when all this finally shows up in Google.
This page must still do well for some of my MBA Classmates' names and photos. Considering all the pain and problems they caused me I don't have any sympathy for any embarassment this causes. I was only ever trying to help. People asked for my help, or they just stole from me until they got caught. Most people apprechiated my efforts, several classmates credited my study notes with getting them through the CORE accounting final, which is odd considering most people thought Nik wrote it... I've put my MBA behind me and have ceased all contact with these people. I purged them from my address book, LinkedIn, everywhere I could. They were not good for my health to say the least. They can find someone else's back to lie behind. They earned whatever reputation they have, just as I earned mine. I haven't recovered. And despite what Anne DeWolfe said, I was negatively affected by what was said and done, by the threats and allegations that were made, by the punishment and restrictions I was forced to accept, all for trying to help a 'friend'. Enough or too much.