Michael Roebuck's Blog

My friend and Colleague, Karl Ribas originally posted about a company called, "Communicate2" who was bidding on his name in Google. Karl Ribas.com Blog: Schmuck Company Buys My Name.

I find it a compliment that someone thinks that highly of him to want to buy his name. He tended to be a bit negative stating he thought his name was worthless. My reply is if his name was worthless, why are people buying it and why does he have so many subscribers to his blog titled under his name? But I digress. This isn't a post on how worthless Karl is or isn't.

This is about the many schmuck companies that try to achieve success by riding the coat tails of others. The amusing ones fall for tests that have been done specifically to mislead the misleaders! "Example #2" is an example of this.

Example #1: (on right)

Company: Communicate2

Description: Expanding on Karl's complaint. As you can see by the image on the right, compiled of Google Adwords listings as of May 8, 2006 as shown when searching for employee names, this company has bought almost every All Web Promotion employees' name with Google Pay Per Click. I thank them for seeing our company for quality work and wanting to capitalize on our good names, but if they went to the trouble to try to list every employee, why did they omit Kelly? Kelly is one of the leading Yahoo! Merchant Solutions designers and I would think her name would be equally as valuable. At least more valuable in generating Internet leads than my administrative assistant would be. (No offense to my Administrative Assistant)

Example #2:

Company: All the companies in the below image who have optimized pages within their Web Sites for a chance of ranking when someone searches my good name.

Let me explain. A while back I was testing various theories for inflating keyword popularity within the Overture (Now Yahoo!) Keyword Selector Tool. I took numerous variations of my name and inflated the popularity counts. Thereby if someone wanted to know how many searches for "Michael Roebuck" were performed, they would also see variations including, "SEO Expert Michael Roebuck" , "Search Engine Optimization by Michael Roebuck" , "Apprentice Michael Roebuck" , "Bonanza A36 Pilot Michael Roebuck" and my personal favorite, "Peanut Butter and Jelly Michael Roebuck."

Since I inflated the keyword, "SEO Expert Michael Roebuck" these schmuck companies did a popularity search on "SEO" and my name was included as a variation. They then created a leader page on their web site for this keyword phrase. As you can see from the below screenshot of Google taken on May 8, 2006 at around 2:30pm, these optimized pages still exist. Note that I quit inflating the counts over a year ago.

Note also the company that optimized "Search Engine Optimization by Michael Roebuck." They were one of my first followers. I love looking at this guy Svends web Site. It has certainly grown over time and he certainly is a multi talented person. I think he does everything from SEO and Web Design to composing music and selling Real Estate. He even makes and sells ultra healthy cookies! I don't agree with how he performs Search Engine Optimization and especially how he spams his web site with keyword phrases, but that's my opinion. We all do things differently. Some do things right and some do things wrong.

I guess the moral of the story is much like changing my daughters diaper. If your willing to try to capitalize off my name or others, be prepared for what you may get. You could get a little pee or you could get a pile of crap!