Dec 29 2008
Brian Coleman AM and his taxi bills: competing with Lib Dem Voice in Google
Lib Dem Voice had an interesting conversation under the title What should political bloggers be trying to achieve?, where Brian Coleman was used as an example of a search term that had been targeted by the Lib Dems in Google. This was the relevant bit of the conversation about Brian Coleman AM, the London Assembly Member for Barnet (the Lib Dems think he is a bit thin up top) and Camden.
The story is that Brian Coleman was the one who had a go at Lynne Featherstone for calling the Fire Brigade when her boiler made a funny noise, and the Lib Dems don’t like him as a result.
I thought I’d have a test on Google to see how we get on competing for a term such as “Brian Coleman” with the Liberal Democrat blogs on their top rated story for Brian Coleman: “Brian Coleman AM and his taxi bills”
Brian Coleman story picked up by non-Lib Dems
A good example of this during the year have been my various postings about London government on this site (ed: referring to Lib Dem Voice), particularly Boris Johnson and Brian Coleman, which have often been picked up on and further commented on by non-Liberal Democrat bloggers (and occasionally mass-circulation national newspapers) but only very rarely has the story been extended or amplified by other Liberal Democrat bloggers.
Mark’s specific example, on Brian Coleman. His posts are at the bottom of the first page for his name. My post is higher, but still nowhere near top. It is top result for his name + AM, but that’ll be a much rarer search.
If a number of Lib Dem bloggers had picked up and linked to Mark’s posts and my post (which interlink deliberately), we’d be able to get top result for his name. Which would significantly help any campaigns against him next time he’s up for re-election.
Brian Coleman and others on Google
I say:
Never underestimate the value of time. Mark’s post is now at number 5 for “Brian Coleman”. The usual profile in Google at the moment is an initial splash, followed by a drop out of site, then a gradual recovery over months.
When I do the figures for my highest traffic posts, usually 8 or 9 from the top 10 will be more than 3 months old. It is a similar effect.
Recently I did a test with a post when Derek Draper started out his project to annexe the blogosphere. As of the time of writing of this post, the blog is the 12th top website and the 18th top result for “Derek Draper“, and is ther top result for “Dolly Draper” (although Google offers “Polly Draper” instead - which is probably quite appropriate given what he is trying to do!).
Two more examples, the Wardman Wire is currently:
Number 1 for “Bonkers Conkers” due to articles about Health and Safety published in September 2007.
About Number 5 for “Becky Adlington” (and in the top 15 for “Rebecca Adlington”, which is more competitive) after the Olympics (she is a local Mansfield girl and I ran a “Militant about Mansfield” campaign).
More seriously, we are in the top 10 for “zimbabwe election photo” (and a photo on my blog of the effect of torture appears in the four photos appearing in the general search at the top), and also from “robert mugabe photo“.
And - excelletly - critical blog articles from the Usmanov affair are still numbers 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8 among top sites (the Wardman Wire is 6 for my Schillings and Shadenfreude article) for a search for “Schillings” on Google.
I’m also the third site for a Google search for “Lib Dem Voice” for the first ever article I wrote about it, entitled “Lib Dem Voice on the Skids - due to close” written at the time of Rob Fenwick’s “over to you, personren” ultimatum. The Wardman Wire is also number 1 for “Tangerine Book” and number 3 for “The Tangerine Book” (no 2 is the LibDemVoice article linking back to mine). So they’d better behave or I’ll start causing trouble.
All of these are old articles.
Mark Pack on Brian Coleman
This is the Mark Pack article that is now number 3 on Google for “Brian Coleman AM”:
Fire Brigade Union: Brian Coleman was wrong
“A footnote to yesterday’s post about Brian Coleman, who seems to think he knows better than the Fire Brigade about when people should call them - here is an extract from an email sent by the Fire Brigade Union to their London branches:
The FBU’s regional secretary for London, Joe MacVeigh, said, “Councillor Coleman needs to decide whether he wants to be a serious political figure or whether he wants to continue playing the role of complete buffoon. He holds a position of enormous responsibility, and he should be dignified and statesmanlike in everything he does. Instead, he blunders around, whipping up controversy, and trying to draw attention to himself at every opportunity. Such an attitude does not befit the office of head of the world’s third largest fire and rescue service. His remarks about [Lynne Featherstone] were disgraceful. If an ordinary firefighter had said such a thing to a female colleague, he would almost certainly have been facing disciplinary action.”
And there were several more as well.
Wrapping Up
Brian Coleman, by the way, is an anagram of “Lamebrain Con” or “Banal Incomer” (I have no idea about the “Incomer” part).
For that matter, Lib Dem Voice is an anagram of both “Become Livid” and “I Led Vice Mob”.
Let’s see how this article gets on in Google.