HostingCon 2010 is taking place in a couple days in Austin, Texas. I am joining 20 of my colleagues at HostDime on the trip to HostingCon where we will be doing our second booth at a conference. This booth however will be in a 20 x 20 foot area right in front of the entrance to the conference.

A little bit about HostingCon. This is by far the biggest conference in our industry with an estimated 1500 – 2000 attendees this year which is another increase from the previous years. It is attended by small and large web hosts, technical providers, marketing teams, investors, and hardware/software service providers. There are over 100 exhibitors and sessions spanning all three days.

This year is huge for HostDime as we are going to be debuting two products that no one else in the industry offers at this time. One of them is our GeoSync Hosting that will revolutionize our industry and the way business’s deliver websites. The other is that we will be demoing and offering paid accounts of the new control panel for windows by cPanel called Enkompass. We will be the only company at HostingCon to have tested the product enough to offer paid accounts at the event.

I have never been to HostingCon so this will be the biggest event I’ve attended with our company. This is also the most involvement I’ve had in preparing for the event. It’s amazing how much work we all put in for 3 whirl-wind days, but I know it will all be worth it in the end. From marketing materials to LED lights, shirts, and stress reliever globes we are definitely going bigger then ever this year! I hope to have some more updates throughout the event from some of the sessions I will be attending.

I had no problems getting this site to rank and simply changing my display name for my twitter account display name to “Dan Silber” got it ranking after a few days and my Posterous Blog right after that. My next two targets were Facebook and LinkedIn. There were already two Dan Silber’s ranking for each of these but I figured all I would need is to update my personal URLs and point some links to them and I’d quickly outrank them.

I updated my LinkedIn username to hddansilber (dansilber was already taken & on page one) and didn’t change anything about my Facebook since it was already dan.silber (current page one profile was desilber). After a couple weeks I was still no where to be found on google and could not figure out why. I thought maybe my facebook profile wasn’t ranking because the username was dan.silber so I had it changed to dansilber but was still not having any success.

The major confusion was that you couldn’t find my profiles at all when I searched for “dan silber site:facebook.com” and “dan silber site:linkedin.com” and I had no idea why or what to do about it.

I spent some time trying to find out if I could find myself on those sites at all when I finally found out where my profiles were hiding. The dreaded Duplicate Content filter caught my profiles because they were similar to the other two that were ranking and filtered my results out. You can see the difference for my LinkedIn search with the filter off here: dan silber site:linkedin.com

Now you can see dansilber, hddan, and hddansilber in the top 5, with hddan being the username I had set before taking on this project. the same search for facebook also now shows all the Dan Silber profiles. So now that I found the problem how do I combat this?

For Facebook I had to analyze the logged out version of both our profiles to find out why his profile was considered the original content. I did this based off of Google’s Best Practices for SEO. I didn’t think there were too many inbound links to either of our profiles so I decided to go the content route and added a bunch of my interests to my profile so it would show up on the logged out version. About 4 days after that I managed to take over as the original content for “Dan Silber” on Google.

My next challenge is to get my LinkedIn profile to be the original source and rank for “Dan Silber”. These profiles have much more opportunity for content and our profiles are already very different so I think that I just need to give it a little more link juice and it will be where I want it to be very shortly.

With all the Social Media sites out there today it might be hard to find who you are looking for if they have a profile at MySpace but you are looking for them in Facebook. A good solution might have been to search their name in Google to see where you could find them but with the duplicate content issues I’ve described above, even Google might not be able to save you!

I will make a follow up post on my progress with LinkedIn in a few weeks as things start to settle down.