The Tuesday push, Geansai Gorm and Yelling if it changes
The Tuesday Push is an initiative started by Damien Mulley to encourage the blogging community to point a spotlight on new or useful services in Ireland.
The Tuesday Push happens every second Tuesday. This particular Tuesday isn’t one of them but I wanted to promote on of my own projects and how it relates to another of Damien’s ideas, the SEO competition.
In short, the SEO competition aims to find out who is the best at search engine optimisation in Ireland. I think the competition is an excellent idea and several sites and blogs are already appearing to compete.
Im interested in the tools and techniques of SEO but I’m not participating myself, I don’t know enough. Im going to be watching the participants and their sites so that I might learn a thing or two to benefit our clients. Hopefully, when this competition ends in December, one or more people will blog about the techniques they used so we might all learn from it.
My own project that I wanted to talk about is ‘Yell if it changes‘. This site was originally started so that I could be notified automatically if some of our customers sites had changed. For a long time I planned to add the ability to monitor the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for changes in the results for specific keywords and URLs, This is now in place.
For the SEO competition, enter the magic words ‘Geansai Gorm‘ and the URL you would like to monitor. You will be notified of the current position(s) in the results page of Google and you will also be notified via email whenever the URL changes position(s). The history of changes in positions are recorded too so it should make for some very interesting data in time.
It isn’t limited to the SEO competition though, anyone can use it to monitor the positions of their own sites for their chosen keywords. Go on, its free and you can use it for as many sites or search terms as you like.
Yell if it changes is a small project I work on in my spare time. There are many many things I plan to add to it in the future to make it more useful to myself and the 200+ users so far. If you have any ideas or comments on Yell, I’d love to hear them.
Tags: damien mulley, geansai gorm, google, google serp, seo, serp, tuesday push, yell
November 4th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
[...] not talk about your own project or a project you like for this week’s push? That’s what Gordon has done. Not had time this week to process the Push or look through the noms for Blog post of the Month. So [...]
November 5th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Hi Gordon - I like the sound of “Yell if it Changes”. I’ll try it out for some of our keywords for puddleducks and let you know how it goes. Thanks — Aedan
November 5th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Hi Aedan. Thank you. Please do, let me know if you have any feedback.
Its a long way from a finished product, my aim was to get it out the door and be useful now as opposed to thinking about it.
November 7th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Gordon. Great idea. Just a couple of things:
1. When you count positions do you count the indented results - I would normally leave those out when I’m counting.
2. Also - you might end up getting a lot of spam on that form - have you a way to stop spam?
3. I set up a monitor on the url and on google but when I log in I only see one of these, and it doesn’t seem to allow me to manage it (e.g. turn it off if I wished).
4. Minor one - but when I copy and paste the password it seems to append a space - not sure what causes this but it may be something in the email which might be fixable.
I mean above points to be helpful - I think it’s a great idea.
Roger
November 7th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Hi Roger,
Being cheeky putting your name as Geansai Gorm aren’t you
1. Yes, it counts the indented results. They could in the 10 per page that Google displays.
2. Stopping form spam is an interest of mine, I have a fair few methods of looking after forms. Thankfully no spam yet.
3. Im working on the log in section at the moment, its not finished yet. It will allow the option to add and remove when finished and I might add the full history of changes too where possible.
4. That happens to me a lot when I copy and paste stuff, I don’t know if its anything Im doing but I’ll check it out.
Thanks for these, keep em coming.
November 7th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
> Being cheeky putting your name as Geansai Gorm aren’t you
Yeah. This competition makes one sink to new lows, but your nice little program has shown that it has made things worse since my last comment:
>http://www.bluejumperinirish.com has changed position on Google from ‘15,16′ to ‘16,17′
Couple of things:
>1. Yes, it counts the indented results. They could in the 10 per page that >Google displays.
I notice that if you have preference set to 100 it tends to show more indented results than if you are at 10 per page. Not sure which is regarded as more “authentic” - my guess is that most people keep the normal setting of 10 per page rather than 100. I think the no. 10 was picked way back when altavista and the like used to be concerned about (a) bandwidth and (b) pageviews.
> 4. That happens to me a lot when I copy and paste stuff, I don’t know if > its anything Im doing but I’ll check it out.
Sometimes it happens for me and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m guessing it’s something in the source of the email - but I could be wrong.
November 7th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Since you gave me the Irish Blogs stats a few months ago, I’ll leave the geansai gorm name in there
This blog is only a small one so I doubt I’ll help much. I like the new word cloud on your site, pretty cool.
I agree, most people stick with the first page of 10 results.I rarely go past page 4 or 5 of the results myself. At the moment, Yell checks the first 50 results.
I think you’re right about the source of the emails too, I’ll check to see if I can improve them.