JLH Design

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I set out to do a little experiment on my own blog, to get the home page rank for my name(s) without actually using them on the page.

This isn’t really an unknown secret in the SEO community but something that seems to elude a lot of webmasters. The concept is even covered well in Google’s own help documentation.

This sure wasn’t a concentrated effort or something I checked even weekly, but I kept my eye on it, and inspired its improvement every once and a while. I was inspired by Google Blogoscoped where profiles link to Google’s #1 result for your name. Unfortunately for me a government document has occupied that space for as long as I remember. Occasionally individual posts would be there because my name is listed as the author, but on the home page was much more difficult as my name only shows up as an image.

Even harder was another pseudonym I use that is plastered all over popular very powerful sites like Sphinn, Twitter, Digital Point, and Digg.

I’m glad to see that today I noticed both are aligned correctly, which will probably fall apart as soon as some ass clown reads this and tries to mess with it. I suppose I could have just rolled out johnhoneck.com which I’ve let Godaddy make million in adsense on while it sits there parked, but that would have been too easy.

Screen shots saved for future proof:

Perhaps it’s time to retire the JLH moniker…

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Update 11/21/07

I just got word that the English to English translate function has been disabled and it doesn’t look like it’s going to come back.

Original Post follows: 

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Just noticed today that Google won’t allow you to translate a page from English to English any more. I get a response:

Translation from English into English is not supported.

Please choose from the following:

Back to Language Tools

See original page

Is it just me, or did this happen a long time ago?

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I was under the impression that Google didn’t want a websites own search results to be crawled and listed in Google. I got this notion from both a Matt Cutts post and the official Google webmaster help group post.

Assuming this is still the case, can anyone tell me why Cooks.com has 112,000 search results indexed by Google? I wouldn’t have noticed this if they hadn’t been ranking for just about every recipe I’ve been searching for lately. The behavior is proliferated by the Recent Searches box in the left navigation column of the site.

I took the Google placebo and submitted a spam report, probably a waste of my 20 seconds.

Updated:12/5/07

Truly a waste of my time, weeks later and they still exist, here’s something for the Googlebot to suck on. Obviously some sites are more equal than others.

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Posting has been pretty light for me lately. I’ve been seriously disillusioned with the industry I’ve been talking about here, but I’ve found some reasons to hit the trail again and figure to be back to our regularly scheduled terrible writing and mere conjecture soon.

In the mean time, I thought I’d share some pictures. Here’s me and 80,000+ friends cheering the Wisconsin Badgers on to victory against the much hated Michigan team.

Here’s a close up of some of the lesser known players. It’s Connor tackling Colin.

Before the game we had to get primed up for the 40 degree weather. For my German readers, here’s a picture of the Jager bus at a tailgate party.

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I’ll be migrating the site to a new server and new IP address in the next couple of days.  So if things are bit wonky, that will be the reason.