Breakdown of a person's Google results [Infographic] | Hacker News Reader

Breakdown of a person's Google results [Infographic]

lifehacker.com

6 pointsJordanian8 comments

Interesting. I wonder why LinkedIn ranks so much higher than some of the other profiles, and why about.me ranks so poorly.

That's a good question. LinkedIn ranking high makes sense but we were really surprised by about.me. Here's a high-level answer

1) LinkedIn tends to rank high because, not only is it a well structured page, but people tend to take the time and fill out all the information. From Google's perspective, the more relevant information about someone on a page, the higher it should rank. Think about it: Twitter gives you 160 characters, and most people barely fill out their FB profiles beyond status updates. On LinkedIn however, people carefully fill out their bio, their headline, all of their education and work experience. They post their resume, get reccomendations, plaster their name everywhere, etc.

2) Why does about.me rank so poorly? On the other end, about.me is structured pretty poorly. You aren't encouraged to publish much content and the page remains relatively static and sparse. Compare that to twitter. Sure on twitter you only get 160 characters in your bio, but it's constantly updating with new content, which Google loves. About.me basically has the worst of both worlds: Not much original content, streams duplicate content from other places, which Google doesn't favor

"only half of people own their first result"

For very low values of "own".

In this case it means that the first result is actually about them, and it's content they control

they control

For now. I wouldn't trust many of those services (not yours specifically) not to suspend my profile for some dumb reason.

It's hard to take this seriously when it omits one of the most obvious ways to get to the top of the ranks: buy a domain with your name in it. Or a variation thereof. In fact, even the social site profiles, you should go for urls that have your name in the slug. If that's not a service offered by the company who built this infographic, then I have to suspect whatever methodology they used to come up with these rankings.

* Edit: Also worth noting. Their "1 billion names searched in Google every day" statistic is suspect. If you follow the actual bit.ly link (bit.ly/MWEFQT), it goes to a paper that references that statistics to some 2004 presentation. There's no indication that "1 billion" isn't 95% searches for "justin bieber/kim kardashian/lindsay lohan". A minor point in the bigger picture, maybe, but hey, it was their choice to headline the infographic with it.

That's a good point Danso. The BrandYourself software actually guides you through all of that. If you submit a LinkedIn for example, but haven't gotten your vanity URL, we guide you through the process until you have. If you submit a personal website and haven't applied a custom domain (yourname.com) we guide you through that too. Basically the service helps you make any profile or link as search engine friendly for your name as possible

This infographic is more of an interesting look into where different profiles generally rank on their own, left to their own devices. Since we track the Google results of over 130K people, millions of results and hundreds of thousands of profiles, we thought it would be cool to see where profiles generally rank.

Does that help at all?

I'm curious: why exactly do your pages need jQuery and mootools for what's essentially a pretty but static HTML page? And more importantly, why aren't they compressed?

It's not that your pages are exactly slow, but you could probably push them way down with a few simple steps.

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