Teach42

First of all, before we even get started, congrats to everybody who is participating in this challenge! Today marks the halfway point. Some of the challenges have been easy, and others I know have stretched some of you. The second half will be more of the latter than the former. We’ll be building on some of the groundwork we laid in the first half and taking it to the next level. Don’t worry if you have joined recently, or have missed some days. Join in when you can, pass when you can’t, catch up if you want, or just skip over ones that don’t appeal to you. If you take any of these challenges and learn something from it, then I consider it mission accomplished. If you’ve kept up and done every challenge every day (or the next day when I post them late at night!), then my hat is off to you. This stuff ain’t exactly a cakewalk, and I’m thrilled to have so many people along for the journey!

Today’s challenge may seem a little egotistical, but believe me when I say that it’s a worthwhile activity for a blogger to do. You’re going to go on an ‘you’ hunt! Visit some of the different blog search engines, and see who’s linking to you, ensure that you show up in searches, and see which searches you appear in. One reason that we want to take the time to do this is to ensure that our blog is actually being submitted to different search engines every time you update it. Most blog engines will automatically submit your posts to search sites, but ONLY if you have it set to do so. We also want to see whether you actually appear in the searches that you think you do. If you search for you name, do they show up too? And if they don’t, why don’t they? These tasks aren’t hard to do, but they’re often overlooked.

I don’t think you’d find to many people that would disagree that there are two big boys when it comes searching blogs, and those are Technorati and Google Blog Search. Sure there are dozens of others, and some of them like IceRocket have got some great feature sets, but we’re going to focus on the major players.

Let’s start off by finding out who’s linking to you. Some blog engines do a decent job of letting you know whenever someone links to your blog by letting you know that you received a ‘pingback’ or ‘trackback’ on a post you wrote. If someone links to that specific post, it’ll show up listed along with comments. WordPress and EduBlogs does that automatically. However, even that will miss out on time when someone links directly to your blog in general, but not a specific post. You search for these links by typing your entire URL into the search box. So I would search for http://teach42.com. One thing you do need to be careful of is that you may get different results if you include the ‘www’ than if you exclude it. On both Google and Technorati I got more results by leaving the ‘www’ off. In theory, they should be the same, but reality is that they aren’t.

If you’re a brand new blogger, don’t be discouraged if you don’t have many, or any, links to your blog yet. It takes time and persistence. Regardless, all of these searches have RSS feeds associated with them. I suggest adding both a Google and Technorati search for links to your blog to your aggregator. That way you can keep an eye on any that might otherwise escape your notice.

Next up is to see how easily people are able to find your content. For this, we’ll be doing a variety of searches. Start off broad and do some searches for your name. In this area, I’m lucky. Dembo isn’t all that common a name, so it’s easy to browse through every hit for that word. If you’re last name is Smith or Jones or Nguyen, you may have more trouble and need to zoom in a bit more. Add your first name, and variations of it. For example, I’d search for Steve Dembo, Stephen Dembo, Steve Denbo, and even throw it into quotes, “Steve Dembo”. Without quotes, it’s finding any blog post that has the word Steve and the word Dembo. With quotes, it’ll just find ones that have Steve right in front of the word Dembo. Generally, one or two of those searches will work better than others. This is useful to see who may be mentioning you in a post, but was too lazy to link you up properly!

Besides just other people’s mentions of your blog, you SHOULD find your own blog posts. It may sound silly, but you do want your own blog posts showing up under your name. If somebody sees your name in a comment or social site, you want them to be able to find you in search engines. That’s why I always tag my blog posts with my blog name, my last name, and have included my full name in the actual title for my blog… to ensure that people can find me if they try to look. Just something to think about. We’ll be coming back to tagging later in the month.

The last set of searches that we want to do are for your blog name and keywords. Once again, that’s the benefit of me having a blog name like Teach42. There aren’t too many other Teach42′s on the internet. If your blog has more common words like 21st Century Open Education 2.0, then you’ll be competing in searches with more people. Hopefully, if somebody types in your full blog name, they’ll find your posts.

If you aren’t finding your posts, then poke around in your blogs settings. In WordPress and EduBlogs, if you go into the Settings->Writing menu, you’ll see at the bottom of the page a box where you can in include what sites to ping when you post something new. While there may be several listed there, make sure Pingomatic‘s http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping is there. It’s a general, all purpose pinger that hits most major (and minor) blog search engines. Most blog engines have a similar functionality somewhere in there, so poke around if need be.

Of course, the other half of this challenge is that when you find people who are linking to you, click through those links and see who they are and what they have to say. While you’re not obligated in any way to respond, it’s always a nice and polite thing to do. If nothing else, you just want to be sure that you’re aware of what’s being said about you, who’s connecting to you and ensuring that you’re hard work is circulating in a way that enables it to be found.

What did you find when you searched for yourself? Was it about what you expected? Any surprises? Did the different search engines have pretty similar results? Any search engines that I’m not mentioning that you think are worth sharing? Share your experiences below, and don’t forget to visit the wiki and list yourself there!