LESMANA

Easter egg link:LESMANA (a link to my real web site)

Update: January 28, 2003

It's been a while, but I've got some good news. Boosting the ranking further is proved to be quite difficult at this point. Simply adding dummy web pages that refer to my website is not effective. This is mainly because the dummy pages are not indexed by Google. It's useless to have many pages that points to your website if Google doesn't care about them. 

To address this problem I go one step further by creating a bunch of dummy websites (instead of just dummy web pages) that refers to my website (this website is one of them). This is done late December last year. The motivation for this strategy is my suspicion that Google pays more attention to websites (a set of interconnected pages within one domain) than independent pages. My suspicion was confirmed a few days later when (some of) the dummy websites were included in Google's index.  Being in Google's index makes their "votes" to my website more worthy. As a result, my website's rank jumped to the 3rd position. This was early this January. 

That's not all, yesterday (1/27) I noticed that my website had climbed to the 2nd position. I don't really know what caused it, perhaps just residual effects from the above strategy. Anyway there's but one more website above mine. ButI still have one more idea. It's not over yet.

Update: November 28, 2002

Yes!! My website ranks in the 5th place. A big jump from 11th place a couple of days ago. But the competition is much tougher now. In the first & second position is a corporate website, in the third position is the official site of a famous Indonesian musician, while in the fourth place is an uninteresting web page that resides in a popular domain dmoz.org (Open Directory Project). Google seems to assign more importance to a page if the domain is popular. Also the fact that Google has a very close relationship with the Open Directory Project might have helped that page to achieve fourth position. It's going to be very tough to beat these guys. We'll see, I don't give up yet. 

Update: November 22, 2002

The plan seems to start working. Today my personal website ranks in the 14th place (second page of Google results). Not too bad, but I'm still hoping that it will make it to the first page (or even the first rank).

Easter egg links: INDONESIA MAP (another link to another website) 
Why?

Well, first I'm annoyed with the fact that when you search for "lesmana" in Google, my website doesn't appear anywhere within the first 100 results. Most of the pages returned are either about a famous Indonesian musician named "Indra Lesmana" or about a radio station in Indonesia which is, coincidentally, named "Lesmana FM".  I'm not a famous person, so I cannot depend on my non-existing fans to put links to my website. I just have to work my way through Google's ranking scheme. Another reason is just plain curiosity. I'd like to find out if my humble plan will be able to influence the powerful Google.

Why Google?

Google is the most popular search engine today. And it is known to produce high quality results too. This results is the outcome of Google's sophisticated search algorithm. Unlike most other search engine, Google doesn't measure the relevance between a page and a query based solely on the content of the page. Instead it depends more on the links between the pages. The more a page is linked from other pages, the more popular it is. More popular pages appear first in the query results. In a sense this approach makes Google very fair and robust. You cannot manipulate Google's results simply by engineering the content of your page (i.e. by adding a bunch of keywords, metadata etc) 

How?

If you want to influence Google, you have to play their game. The plan is simple, I'll try to make as many pages as I can that provide a link to my website. To make sure that my website is associated with my last name, the keyword for the link has to be "Lesmana". This trick is known as Google Bomb (Ok, so I admit, it's not an original idea). An effort by myself may not be good enough to have any effect on Google. Besides, I don't want to spend my life creating useless web pages. This is where you can help me achieve my ambition. Copy and paste the following HTML code somewhere in your site:

I'd really appreciate if you'd do that. That's it. We'll see if it works.

Champaign, November 2002
Reza Lesmana