I hate Google.

[Shawn]

When Website Publisher is #1 and #2 for "Shawn Weeks," there is something seriously wrong. When my personal website, for, you know, ME, Shawn Weeks, is ranked #19, something is very wrong.

What is the point of even optimizing anymore?

[Percept]

Yeah this makes no sense what so ever ... I guess we'll see an update pretty soon again to fix that.

[Chris]

Other than the title you only textually say "Shawn Weeks" in one spot (the copyright statement) whereas in this thread it is mentioned 5 times now.

[GCT13]

Shawn I hate to make light of your perdicament, but that's pretty funny.

Here's a thought - have you taken into account Google's Local Rank? If I were you I'd seek out another Shawn Weeks who has a website and exchange links. You two Shawns may end up battling for the top two spots, but what they hey it's better than nothing. Heck, that's what I'm doing! I'm very close to coming to agreement with Dan O'Brien, the olympic decathalon competitor (http://www.danobrien.com/intro.html). When my personal website launches very soon we're going to exchange links on our respective homepages (something like: "Were you looking for the other Dan O'Brien??"). I probably won't be able to attain the #1 position, but I may end up on the first page of the serps.

.....okay I kid, I kid! :D

To be honest, I don't think your site is seriously optimizes for "Shawn Weeks". Google's got like 6 pages of shawnweeks.com indexed, and not one of those pages has "Shawn Weeks" wrapped in an <h1> tag, and none of the pages links to the homepage with the text "Shawn Weeks". If you view the source, there's few instances of "Shawn Weeks" in there (besides the meta tags). Work on that, and add a "Shawn Weeks" text link in every signature of every forum you participate, and I bet you'll be in business in one or two Google updates. Good luck!

(Otherwise, I think this thread will become #1 for Shawn Weeks :D :) :D )

[Percept]

Originally posted by Chris
Other than the title you only textually say "Shawn Weeks" in one spot (the copyright statement) whereas in this thread it is mentioned 5 times now.

Ah, so that's also the reason for website publisher to score high for other peoples websites ? People just talk to much about their website and keywords on this forum :)

[Shawn]

The top sites don't even mention "Shawn Weeks," only the #1-#2 do. My site does not deserve to be ranked #19.

[GCT13]

Originally posted by Shawn Weeks
The top sites don't even mention "Shawn Weeks,"But they do have scattered instances of "shawn" and "weeks", moreso even than your site.

To rehash, on your homepage excluding meta tags, you have "shawn weeks" competing against 4 other words in your <title>, and in microscopic print on the footer. That's it. There isn't even an image alt attribute for the "Shawn Weeks" image.

Link up "Shawn Weeks" in your forum signatures and any other sites you have, and check back to see the good news in 6-8 weeks.

p.s. - You're #5 for "shawn weeks" (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22shawn+weeks%22).

[Shawn]

I am #5. The SERPs updated tonight.

[GCT13]

Ah sorry, should have emphasized the quotes in the search string.

[Mike]

I don't like what they're doing at the moment either. For top results for "msn emotions", they're bringing up forum posts and search results pages. How can these rank higher than my site with some only having one instance of "msn emotions" in them?

[incka]

Yeah... All they do is link to similar sites...

[r2d2]

Don't quite see why your worried? How many people search for "Shawn Weeks"?

[incka]

People might have heard that Shawn Weeks develops the best websites, but don't know his URL so search google for him.

[r2d2]

Yeah I guess, thought maybe Charleston Web Design might be more important...

[Jaffro]

Slighty OT, but building on what mike's problem is to just reinforce the point.
I dont really understand how a forum thread gets higher than the page its self. My msn emotions site got its pr and i checked its backlinks and the only backlink is to a thread here at wp!

What causes a forum thread to be higher than an optimised site? And why are there these random loosely related (with one keyword or just se results etc) sites in the top se places?

[incka]

Who knows... TFS (I won't mention it, as you haven't) should be in your backward links next update.