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

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

#1
A while ago, I decided to write a simple personal landing page. I went about it as any average HN reader would, I googled what the best free way to deploy static html was. I went with Github pages + Cloudflare, as using S3 + Cloudfront did not justify mulling around with paying AWS. The ssl certificate is shared between several site, but oh well, it'll do.

I reused an old domain (vv.mk), that I had previously used for a Blogger blog, spent some time playing with latencies, as my page loaded in a second and a half, and Cloudflare didn't seem to cache it. Lesson: Cloudflare does not edge-cache html, and you need a Page Rule to enable it via their interface.

I learnt a bit about webfonts, and finally decided to host the fonts myself (on Github pages), rather than do a roundtrip to google, as it added about 300ms on average to page load, using a setup that would work for most recent browsers (https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com).

I confirmed I had a blazingly fast site via http://www.webpagetest.org/ and https://tools.keycdn.com/, and then it was time to make Google return it when people searched for my full name.

To my chagrin, this does not seem to be easy. I added my name to the title and the description HTML meta tags. I added the domain to the Google Search Console in all its versions (www, no-www, http, https), asked the Google crawler to cralw it and update its index. I added links to it to my social networks profiles where they hadn't been already added.

A day after, the Google index is not updated, my site, along with the description of the content that it had up to a day ago, is buried well into the 4th Google results page. My google searches on SEO of personal websites have been completely unfruitful. The 1st Google results page is still populated with useful info (most of my social network profiles), but it seems logical that a personal website would be returned as the first result.

Any tips?

edit: Most of the comments suggest this is due to the lack of content. While I accept this might be a cause for the bad ranking, the lack of content is quite intentional, the page is meant to be a sort of a personal landing page with links to social networks profiles, workplaces, etc.

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

#4
post #3

Change your name to something unique.

It is quite unique. Almost all of the results in the first three Google result pages are legitimate, mostly pointing to a plethora of social networks profiles.

edit: put original edit in sub-comment.

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

#7
Content and links. If there are lots of competing search results for the same query, one of the factors that Google uses to rank them is the number and quality of the sources of incoming links.

How do you get links? You put something on the site that's worth linking to and promote it. There isn't really a shortcut here.

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

#10
post #3

Change your name to something unique.

It is quite unique. Almost all of the results in the first three Google result pages are legitimate, mostly pointing to a plethora of social networks profiles. edit: put original edit in sub-comment.

Quite unique? There is one other internet user with my first name and I once accidentally got signed up to a social network account meant for him.

Your name is either unique or it isn't...

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