April 6th, 2008

By Darren Barefoot

Filed under:
Blogosphere, Sports
12 Comments »

Can SEO Get Julie to the Olympics?

A couple of years ago my wife Julie started a figure skating blog. She’s got a particular purpose in mind for this project: she wants to get media accreditation for the skating events at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.

One way to do this is to write the most popular figure skating blog in the world, according to Google. She currently sits in the #2 spot.

The goal is to get her up to the top spot, and I need your help. If you’re so inclined, please link to Julie’s blog with the phrase ‘figure skating blog‘. Collectively, we ought to be able to boost her up to the top spot, eh?

To entice you, she’s collected eight of the worst falls in figure skating (Digg that mofo, if you’re thus inclined). It’s, uh, not for the squeamish. My favourite is the hip check that Laetitia Hubert lays on Midori Ito.

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Comments: 12 Responses so far

Ice Mom
April 6th, 2008
7:31 pm

Done! I hope she makes it into the press box!

hyearn
April 6th, 2008
11:47 pm

Is there anybody willing to make friends with me? l’m Chinese,and l’m the beginner of SEO.l understood the foreign SEO domain developed fast.So i hope you can help me to learn more about SEO.My msn :hyearn@hotmail.com.Happy to be my friend,but unkind people is undesirable.

Derek K. Miller
April 6th, 2008
11:57 pm

Here’s the Digg URL:

http://digg.com/other_sports/Eight_of_the_World_s_Nastiest_Figure_Skating_Falls

Raul
April 7th, 2008
8:48 am

You know… I’ve been reading your blog for the longest time, and I did NOT know Julie had a figure skating blog. That IS awesome. I love figure skating (I even have a post about Jeff Buttle’s win at the Worlds this year). I’ll link to Julie shortly.

Oh Canada! Great results in figure skating « Random Thoughts of a Student of the Environment
April 7th, 2008
8:51 am

[...] – I just learned from Darren Barefoot that his wife Julie has a figure skating blog. Go check it out! She is looking to get media [...]

Russell
April 7th, 2008
3:14 pm

I will post a blog about it tonight and link to it. Not that anyone ever goes to my blog but what the heck, it can’t hurt.

Derek K. Miller
April 8th, 2008
8:15 am

I just checked out the other Figure Skating Blog, which must get its #1 ranking substantially from the domain itself. Not that it’s bad, but much is not about figure skating, and it goes months at a time without updates. Such is the mystery of Google’s algorithm.

Success for Boot and Blade
April 17th, 2008
8:21 am

[...] a quick note to say thanks to everybody who linked to Julie’s figure skating blog. She’s now in the number one spot for the Google search [...]

Rob Cottingham » Boot and Blade: figure skating blog goes for Olympic gold
April 17th, 2008
3:30 pm

[...] Julie has vied successfully to become the number one Google result for a search on the phrase “figure skating blog”, thanks partly to smashing blog posts but also to a concerted effort to link that phrase to her blog (see previous paragraph). Her ultimate goal: media accreditation to the 2010 Olympic Games. [...]

Garbanzo
April 22nd, 2008
12:51 pm

No fair having an SEO husband! Any special tricks that you used (other than fixating on the term “figure skating blog”)? Oddly, she doesn’t show up high at all on “figure skating” alone (around #800 by my count).

Frank
April 22nd, 2008
3:22 pm

Not sure if SERP means the “most popular” blog in the world. What kind of traffic does this ranking get her?

darren
April 22nd, 2008
3:53 pm

Garbanzo: No trick, really. It’s just basic SEO. Get people to link to your site with the phrase you want to optimize for.

It’s no surprise that BootandBlade.com doesn’t shop up under “figure skating”. There’s way, way more competition for that phrase than “figure skating blog”. It would take some serious effort to get into the top ten results for “figure skating”.

Frank: SERP definitely does not empirically mean “most popular”. However, in many things, perception is reality. To many laypeople, #1 in Google = most popular.