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Ask HN: How to become the first result of a Google search for a name?

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71–80 of 88 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to become the first result of a Google search for a name?

#71

It definitely helps to have a unique name, but it's possible without. A lot of good advice in this thread, but as someone who achieved what you want, some extra points: * Don't focus on one site. Spread your content around on as many sites as possible and link each one back to your home page. This is easier than you might expect -- nearly all tech sites are looking for content creators, whether or not they explicitly…

I'll second the point about creating a hub. I've pushed my personal site + blog to the first page for my name using this technique. https://www.google.com/search?q=Taylor+Edmiston&ie=UTF-8&oe=... I link back to it from everywhere, especially my social profiles. The blog is more important in terms of content, so I'm planning to transition to that being my main hub with everything else as a profile page on that site ev…

FYI, it looks like you have an expired SSL cert on your website.

Re: Ask HN: How to become the first result of a Google search for a name?

#72
post #21

Do all the things. 1. Full name as a .com helped me. Put your name in the page content too, whether it is a heading or a footer. 2. Content. Content. Content. Google needs a good reason to put your site at the top. 3. Site needs to be mobile friendly. 4. Use webmaster tools. Use Data Highlighter to show google what parts of your page are important. Make sure structured meta data is okay too. 5. Google Products, why w…

Interesting that you didn't mention inbound links. Despite all their anti spam efforts, Google rankings are still mostly about who has the most inbound links from the most prominent sites. Pagerank[1] still seems to trump everything else, content, relevance, etc.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Re: Ask HN: How to become the first result of a Google search for a name?

#73
edit: other people have said what would be my reflexive suggestion: a domain name that is actually your name would likely get a lot of search ranking juice. Besides having a meta title of your name, you need to have an h1 tag -- and not just the html; it should look like a major headline -- with your name, as opposed to what it is now ("Welcome").

Here's an easy fix:

     Welcome to Viktor Vojnovski's homepage



------------

> but it seems logical that a personal website would be returned as the first result.

Does it? If I'm an employer researching a job candidate, and the job candidate has bought their own vanity domain but left it empty of worthwhile content, would visiting that page be a better use of my time than that candidate's Twitter, LinkedIn, or public Facebook page?

The fact that your page itself lists these social media URLs makes your homepage, theoretically, more useful in a broad kind of sense. But it's not obviously more useful than just directly seeing your tweets on first click.

And on a quasi-technical note, think of the heuristic/algorithmic hoops Google's search engine would have to resolve in order to rank a page like yours over Twitter and LinkedIn:

1. LinkedIn page is ranked first because LinkedIn is an extremely popular site.

2. Random webpage that links to LinkedIn page should get quality points because it also purportedly links to the person's other social URLs, and a normal human being would find that useful.

I know Google search logic and variety of signals is quite complicated and probably handles situations like these, but think of how easy it might be to game such a heuristic that gives pages quality points based on the quality of pages that they link to. That's almost exactly backwards of the original Google BackRub algorithm.

Other than getting legit sites to link to you (putting the URL in your Twitter bio might help, though Twitter renders it with a nofollow tag), your easiest bet to get higher is to add content to your site. A blog with intermittent updates would be ideal, but are you really unable to write a public-facing biography for yourself?

The ultimate question is: the purpose of Google and the Web are not to make things nice for any one user. Ideally, Google surfaces results that it thinks humans actually would be satisfied on clicking on. Let's imagine that someone, anyone out of the billions of Internet users on any given day, decides to search for your name.

Can you put yourself in the place of that user and honestly believe you'd be satisfied with landing on your basically empty homepage? Web users don't benefit from all the meta optimizations that you've added, they are there for the content.

Re: Ask HN: How to become the first result of a Google search for a name?

#74
post #35

Does Google still prefer .com TLD over others? I moved from it to a country-based TLD and have similar problems with indexing now.

I think it depends - I've owned "steve.org.uk" since the nineties and I used to be the first result for searches for both "steve" and "steve kemp" in the UK.

Now I've relocated to Finland and I happened to do so just as steve.fi was expiring. So I've migrated to that domain as the lack of nested domain is easier to handle.

I'm still in the top five for "Steve Kemp", but personalized searches make it a little hard to tell. (My biggest problem is that there are a bunch of sites that link to the baseball player, who shares my name, including wikipedia etc. Hard to outrank that!)

Re: Ask HN: How to become the first result of a Google search for a name?

#75
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sha1("date\n") == "a975c295ddeab5b1a5323df92f61c4cc9fc88207"

Haha, this is even more baffling! How did you know that? PS: Might it have come from a botched attempt to hash the current date?

Yes, it's true. I think I can explain it as follows. I wanted to type:

    date | sha1sum
Then another part of my brain decided to type:

    echo "blah blah gibberish" | sha1sum
But then I ended up typing:

    echo date | sha1sum
I suspect you could reverse engineer that with standard password cracking techniques.

Re: Ask HN: How to become the first result of a Google search for a name?

#76
post #11

1. Get your full name as a .com (victorvojnovski.com) 2. Put any real content on it. Maybe a blog? Helps to have links back. 3. Wait a few years. 4. Success!

> Get your full name as a .com (victorvojnovski.com) Do this NOW. Seriously.

".com" is for businesses, so it seems strange to use it for a personal name.

Also, next year the trend may be to register ".io", etc. You might end up on a slippery slope, paying $100 per year for something that you don't really need.

Re: Ask HN: How to become the first result of a Google search for a name?

#77
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fyi, it's "Republic of Macedonia".

If you wanna be correct and not upset the Greeks, it's "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia".

Which in turn upsets another set of people. There isn't, AFAIK, a non-offensive designation for this area.

Re: Ask HN: How to become the first result of a Google search for a name?

#78

It definitely helps to have a unique name, but it's possible without. A lot of good advice in this thread, but as someone who achieved what you want, some extra points: * Don't focus on one site. Spread your content around on as many sites as possible and link each one back to your home page. This is easier than you might expect -- nearly all tech sites are looking for content creators, whether or not they explicitly…

I'll second the point about creating a hub. I've pushed my personal site + blog to the first page for my name using this technique. https://www.google.com/search?q=Taylor+Edmiston&ie=UTF-8&oe=... I link back to it from everywhere, especially my social profiles. The blog is more important in terms of content, so I'm planning to transition to that being my main hub with everything else as a profile page on that site ev…

Also looks like you went to prison for murder.

Re: Ask HN: How to become the first result of a Google search for a name?

#79
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Google figure out if visitors stayed on the page? Chrome telemetry (creepy)? Google Analytics (are you required to use this to get a good ranking)?

If a user clicks on a link on a search page, stays a few seconds on the new page and then press 'back', and clicks on another link on the search, that's a pretty strong signal to Google that the first link wasn't that good.

Hmmm. If true, I wonder if cmd-clicking the top N links into other tabs can be distinguished or if it's harmful for their ranking. Also, does going back cause a reload?

Re: Ask HN: How to become the first result of a Google search for a name?

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll second the point about creating a hub. I've pushed my personal site + blog to the first page for my name using this technique. https://www.google.com/search?q=Taylor+Edmiston&ie=UTF-8&oe=... I link back to it from everywhere, especially my social profiles. The blog is more important in terms of content, so I'm planning to transition to that being my main hub with everything else as a profile page on that site ev…

FYI, it looks like you have an expired SSL cert on your website.

Thanks, I'll get that taken care of.
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