WSJ - “You’re a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well”
The Wall Street Journal has an article about how having a common name can hurt you in Google’s page ranking (“You’re a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well”). The meat of the article, to me, more talks about having an “online brand”. What I mean by that is that you are associated with your pages. For example, when I look for myself on Google with “Sean Lavelle”, 6 of the Top 10 hits are pages associate with me.
But the really problem is how to differentiate your pages from everyone else named Sean Lavelle? How do they get my pages instead of :
- A story about Sean Lavelle, a Sinn Fien politician, who was a paid informant for the British (if I read the story correctly).
- A different Sean Lavelle’s genealogy search
- A Sean Lavelle, who bought a pub in Ballina, Ireland
- Some pharmaceutical research from Sean M Lavelle
While I am pretty happy about where I fall in that list (#1, #2 are my resume on Emurse.com, the other 4 are this blog), I could see where some people would run into a problem. I didn’t really do anything to improve my search ranking, other then tagging posts that are about me and my online identity with the keyword “Sean Lavelle”. Now if your name was John Smith or some other very common name, there is no way just doing that could get you on the first couple pages.
A couple in the article talks about finding a name that is not very popular for there soon to be born baby. Now frankly, this is ridiculous, as by the time the child grows up I really don’t think we will be using Google (at least in the present form). And I’d be kind of pissed at my parents if they named me Saraswathi Lavelle solely so it might help my Googlability. Not that Sarawathi is a bad name, but not solely based on popularity.
I think that then next big thing we are going to see are Identity Aggregators. Some way that ties all this information together and allows an identity to be searched for instead of a string of text. Spock looks interesting in this regard and if I get an invite to it, I will attempt to share what it looks like with you all.
And just one note on a pet peeve of mine. Whenever I read in an article that the search for “XYZ” returns 4,832,973,543 results (actually 22,700,000) it drives me crazy. I don’t know if the article’s author knows, but a search for Sean Lavelle(210,000) is different for a search for “Sean Lavelle”(990 results). On searches for any documents that contain “Sean” or “Lavelle” while the later search will only find “Sean Lavelle”.
