The saddest part about personal websites now is that if someone googles your name, your presence on social media sites, an about page of a project or company you worked for, or any news outlet article where your name is mentioned will rank first and ahead of any personal website.
I understand if one's full name combination is too common to show every personal website, but I feel like if a unique name is googled, or there's one or two decidedly well known person(s) of that name, and that person has authored a personal site, search engines should prioritize that on the first page, if not the very first result(s).
Try googling for John Carmack, Barack Obama, or (op) Mark Christian. What's the SEO required to get your personal page to be the first result on a search engine?
> What's the SEO required to get your personal page to be the first result on a search engine?
Is this really an issue?
Someone looking for you personally either for professional or personal reasons already knows who you are so probably already has the relevant URL: from your CV or application form/letter, on a business card, from an email footer, because you've posted links on social media where they are linked to or otherwise follow you, from your profiles on online forums, by deriving it from your email address, ...
Someone looking for the sort of content you are publishing (if it isn't personal journal/diary/blog/etc. style content) will be searching for terms relevant to that and not your name, or those terms plus your name if you are well known in the field. Any SEO should be targetted at that content, not your name.
Before asking "how would someone find me by searching for my name?", first consider "why would anyone feel the need to find me by searching for my name?". It is most likely not a problem you actually need to solve.
> your presence on social media sites, an about page of a project, ... ... will rank first and ahead of any personal website
Because those things are most likely what people are actually looking for. Remember: search engines are focused on giving the searchers what they want, not sending them to where you want them to go.
Where you have control of the content (you might on a project page, you will on your social media accounts), solve that problem by having links to your personal page in a prominent place. If someone doesn't click the extra time then they really weren't wanting to find you hard enough!
I would like to find peoples personal websites by searching for their names. I shouldn't have to go through LinkedIn for that. If there was a search engine that favored non-social media sites or was tweakable to find less trafficked, smaller domains, I would use it extensively. Google results are too often sabotaged.
> I shouldn't have to go through LinkedIn for that.
Then don't. It's not that difficult to recognize a result from LinkedShit or any other 'social' 'media' site, ignore that result, and move your attention to the next one in the list.
My full name is very common. I share it with an actor, a photographer, two designers, and one basketball player. Three of us have personal websites and one of us has a Wikipedia page.
I've adopted the alias "r3bl" to counter that, so that there's something easy to remember and somewhat unique that others could type into a search engine. ".com" was of course squatted, but as far as I could tell, it was pretty unique (with one "e" emitted and one "e" replaced with a 3 like a True Hacker). Now I share that alias with two esports teams and one Silicon Valley company that could afford to buy ".com" from the squatter. I appear anywhere from #1 result to not on the first page at all, depending on your location.
I can provide a counter example to this. Searching for my full name (and for many years my first name) has always resulted in my personal website being the top link.
It's not SEO, it's just age. I am an old man with an old school website that's happened to have been up for a long time.
> It's not SEO, it's just age. I am an old man with an old school website that's happened to have been up for a long time.
Disagree. My first personal web page from 1996 is still online and I have a very rare (perhaps unique) name. Until a few years ago, all my personal pages (including FB, Twitter) were ranked high by search engines, but since then they've been dethroned by references to former companies, press coverage, websites that list people affiliated with corporations and other such things.
My conclusion from this is that personal pages have somehow been ranked lower recently and news sites and popular websites will be ranked higher if they mention your name (even if the mention is not prominent and years old). This means that nowadays it would probably be useful to put a personal homepage on a popular site like about.me.
I have a ten year old personal website that does not appear to be indexed by google at all anymore. There was an article about this that made the front page, that some old websites are being dropped from the index. If you search my name from duck duck go its the first hit.
Your website is indexed by Google. You can see whether it's indexed by running a site specific search. Put "site:" before the domain name. But that site has three pages, one of which is a blog listing with no content. It's not ranked because there's nothing worth ranking.
If you are searching for information about me, it is the best source online. Ideally the best sources are listed first. DDG does that, and Google doesn't list it even in the first half-dozen pages. Is it really a worse website than all the spam white-page sites?
For the longest time searching for "Steve", in the UK, brought my website as the first result.
These days with "personalised" search results it is harder to tell, but my own searches for my full-name bring me first. Even though I share that name with a few other people.
(I wish I'd bought steve.com, there was a time when I was tempted but after a year or two it was too late. I ended up having https://steve.org.uk, then later https://steve.fi after I moved to Finland.)
Me too. I have a simple static site/blog with mostly textual content going back to around 1999 and I'm lucky to have a reasonably unique firstname/lastname combo (ish); my blog currently is top on Google and Bing.
Not true. I can give the counter point. When you Google the name of my better half you get a "fact card" with reference to her website. The first "regular" search result is again her website. The second result is her Facebook page.
As the algorithm is hidden it is hard to say why. But should I guess then I think embedded microdata is an important weight (https://schema.org).
For the record: She has no Wikipedia page (as most notable people would have) which typically rank very high.
I was going to say that you can combat this by simply linking to your website from all these profiles but it turns out that virtually all social media sites `rel="nofollow"` homepage links. Which in itself is a pretty sleazy tactic (sure, the official reason is to combat spam).
Before they did that there was tremendous abuse by spammers. I'm sure the reason they haven't come up with a good workaround for regular ppl is more in line with their general sleazyness
> The saddest part about personal websites now is that if someone googles your name, your presence on social media sites, an about page of a project or company you worked for, or any news outlet article where your name is mentioned will rank first and ahead of any personal website.
I have my site linked on pretty much all those social sites, and it ranks first.
Have a globally unique name, not to mention a first.last domain probably doesn’t hurt either.
For me, it's LinkedIn, my work's website, then my personal site. But there's nobody else in the world with my name, so that helps. If your name is common you'd have to put in significant work, I imagine. If you share a name with someone noteworthy, you're probably sol.
I find it interesting how if I Google my name, the results are Facebook (search results for <my name>), Facebook (profile of someone else with my name), my LinkedIn, my website, and then a bunch of shady background check and voter info websites. It used to be that my GitLab was result 4 on page 1 and my website was on page 2, now they've switched places. I haven't done any SEO (or if I have, it was not intentional).
That works for me. I'm not famous enough to merit a Wikipedia page, and I don't really care if I'm on the first page of a search for my name. (Some other person with the same name does.) Most of the traffic to my personal site comes from searches, but those people are searching for what I write about, not who I am.
My names not super common yet not uncommon. My personal website is the top couple results googling my own name. I think it just takes time and diligence. Actually writing things that get people to link to you.
My (not uncommon) name used to have my site in the top 3, then I was pushed to page 5-6 by the opening of a Night Market in Bangkok, I guess there are worse ways to go.
I understand if one's full name combination is too common to show every personal website, but I feel like if a unique name is googled, or there's one or two decidedly well known person(s) of that name, and that person has authored a personal site, search engines should prioritize that on the first page, if not the very first result(s).
Try googling for John Carmack, Barack Obama, or (op) Mark Christian. What's the SEO required to get your personal page to be the first result on a search engine?