Our location in Google search results

Hi all,

As I think about the Thank You project, more and more, I think of the website as a very positive long term monument to the impact that Dr. Sarno has had on people's lives. I fully expect it to keep growing after Dr. Sarno's retirement, and look forward to delivering a second volume to Dr. Sarno in October. Perhaps additional volumes after that.

The key, I think, is getting the project high enough in search engine results pages. Once that happens, anyone who searches for Dr. Sarno (whether they are skeptical journalists, researchers, people still in pain, or success stories) will know about the project, and a significant fraction of the people who have recovered will want to submit their stories. All that we will have to do is post them, add them to the book, and wait for more.

Thanks to some excellent work by BrianLeeJackson, the website has already been found by Google. This is pretty amazing, as it took many weeks for Google to even find the TMS Wiki when we first set it up.

I thought it might be interesting to track where the website shows up in the list of search results when someone searches for "dr sarno" in Google.

The goal is that when someone - anyone - searches for the name "dr sarno," I want them to see this wonderful website on the first page of search results.

So far, the result is on the seventh page of search results, as the 69th search result.

So how do we get it to move up?

There are two super important things we can do. The first thing is to get sites to link to the the website. I've already put a link to the website at the top of every page of the wiki, and over the next several days and weeks, Google will notice this. Whenever Google sees a link to a site, it figures that the site must be pretty good, so it moves the site up in its search results. This is, in fact, probably the number one way to get a web site higher in the search results.

However, we need to get other TMS-friendly sites to link to the site as well. I don't think that this will be super hard because it is a feel-good, uplifting project that bloggers won't mind linking to. So, if you know anyone who has a blog who might be open to this, please consider contacting them to ask them if they'd do an entry about it.

The second thing is that if you have a gmail account, log in to it then search for "Thank You Dr. Sarno" in Google. In the search engine results, hover over the link to www.thankyoudrsarno.org, but DON'T click it. Instead, look for the little light blue "+1" that appears. Click that instead. That will tell Google that you like the site and that you think it should be ranked more highly.

Anyway, those are two tips for helping to get the search engine results up higher. I know that Google collects data on who clicks on which search engine results, so I strongly suspect that simply clicking on the link in search engine results will help as well.

I'll keep this post updated as the weeks go by, charting our progress as we move up the results pages.

 

Whoah. I just checked again and we're already up to 66.

Google, you never cease to amaze me....

Note: when collecting data like this, it's important to log out of your google/gmail account first, because Google shows different data to different people. I always do this.

 

I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't checked it myself, but www.thankyoudrsarno.org is now the 34th result when one google's "dr sarno"!

 

Thanks! I think that will help a lot.

We're currently the 27th result for "Dr. Sarno." To get much farther, I think we're going to have to start getting people to link to the site. Perhaps we could approach some of the classic TMS sites and ask for links. For example, Dr.Sopher's site, or Rachel's Homage to Dr. Sarno.

 

Nice! That will be very helpful.

I have Rachel's facebook account but haven't had the time to contact her yet. I have a family connection to Dr. Sopher, but haven't contacted him since I was first exploring the diagnosis, many years ago (again, no time, and I wanted to get a solid disclaimer on the wiki before beginning to request links--finding and developing relationships with pro-bono lawyers with the right expertise is hard)

I don't think it would be bad to have different people contact them about different projects, though. Contacting them about www.thankyoudrsarno.org is probably a great way to establish a relationship, as well.

 

As a starting point, we could use: "Personal thank-yous to Dr. John E. Sarno, MD, describing how his idea of TMS helped people recover from back pain, neck pain, RSI, and many other conditions." Does that sound good?

Is this the "Meta" field, labeled as "Home description" on this page? Should it be more keyword packed or is it meant for human eyes, such that it is more important to capture human being's interest?

I asked one of the TYDS contributors for a blog post and link and it looks like we might get one! It will be from http://imaginistix.blogspot.com/ and from their Facebook page.

 

I bet that there is a connection there. I think that reachouts like this are absolutely key to developing our relationships with the sites that will eventually be responsible for raising our rankings in the search engine results pages.

Speaking of our rankings, they've fluctuated a lot recently. They dropped down to 69 for quite a few days, but are now up to 19. I asked brian and he said that the drop in rankings is common, that sites initially jump up when they are new, but that Google drops them down over time as they are less fresh.

In terms of jumping back up to 19, I think that that is due to the links that we've received, primarily from the sitenotice at tmswiki.org and various posts on tmshelp.com. Remember, if you have ways to get links, the more the better!

 

I think that that is a great idea. There might be some pushback, but there is only one way to find out.

It wouldn't help with Google search rankings because Wikipedia uses the "nofollow" tag. Their links look like

HTML:

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://thankyoudrsarno.org">TYDS!</a>

instead of

HTML:

<a href="http://thankyoudrsarno.org">TYDS!</a>

Google therefore ignores those links when calculating Page Rank.

However, it would be a steady source of visitors who might otherwise not know anything about it. Those visitors might tell people, might contribute, and might even link from their blogs.