Open Thread: Would You Change Your Name for Google’s Sake?
May 8th, 2007 (2:56pm) Anne Zelenka 19 CommentsTweet This
The Wall Street Journal reports that in an age of Googling and online personas, names matter. But not exactly in the way Freakonomists think. No, these days, you’d do well to have an unusual name that will not leave you buried by more famous people in Google searches:
In the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online. Many people aspire for themselves — or their offspring — to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking sites’ member lookup functions. But, as more people flood the Web, that’s becoming an especially tall order for those with common names. Type “John Smith” into Google’s search engine and it estimates it has 158 million results. (See search results.)
For people prone to vanity searching — punching their own names into search engines — absence from the first pages of search results can bring disappointment. On top of that, some of the “un-Googleables” say being crowded out of search results actually carries a professional and financial price.
Parents even resort to checking Google before naming their children, hoping to give their offspring a leg up in the online market of professional repute.
The Journal suggests a number of ways in which people boost their names in the rankings: cultivating their profiles on LinkedIn, signing up for services like Ziggs, even changing or augmenting their names to make them more distinctive. For example, “Jason Smith” became “Jason McC Smith.” Perhaps they should have mentioned blogging using your own real name as a means of self-centric search engine optimization.
What have you done to boost your rankings on Google? What would you be willing to do?
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My name is already original – so I don’t have to change it.
But normally I create image links for people to post on their websites/blogs. I also comment on other people’s blogs in hopes of getting noticed, gathering readers, and getting mentioned on other blogs. :-)
Kinda a long shot, but I’m not doing any hardcore advertizing at the moment.
Long before Google, I changed my name, which used to be Ben Lewis, when I got married. Since Ben Langhinrichs is fairly unusual, Google hits tend to be about me.
Anyway, I don’t actively work at making my name popular, but I do use it when blogging and commenting and answering questions on forums. I must be doing something right, as a search for my name gets 97,400 hits, and at least the first several pages are all about me. That is better than Anne Zelenka and Judi Sohn, but nowhere near Om Malik, and about a quarter of those for Mike Gunderloy.
I share a name with a reasonably popular actor, but I still manage to show up in the top 20 for my name. Years ago I was number 1. I’ve never done anything other than blog consistently and the basic search 101 stuff like make sure my name is in the title tag, etc.
This is stupid.
Apparently I share my name with a minor league baseball player and a golf course in the UK, so I’ve got a little competition, but I’ve managed to climb to the #2 spot on Google for my name after only a few months of blogging. Mostly I just try to be consistent with using my full name in my blog title and in comments on other blogs.
This is a great post. As you can see, I’ve got a pretty unusual name. People with uncommon names have the constant hassle of spelling it for people, correcting pronunciation, etc. But it does make SEO a bit easier. I actually rank #2 in Google for just my surname. Now I’ve got to bump ancestry.com out of the #1 spot!
The only problem with uncommon names is the likelihood that people will spell them correctly when searching. I guess we should optimize for common misspellings of our names too. :)
This made me smile. When I got married, I changed my unique maiden name to my husband’s pretty commonplace surname _precisely_ because I wanted to make myself harder to net-stalk at will. Pretty happy with it so far.
Google finds me easily. My name is kind of unique.
I also have my google hits all to myself, and there are plenty of them. The self-employed John and Jane Does of the world should probably cook up a distinctive name for their business and use it constantly next to their real name. Alternately, creating a blog with a distinctive name can give them a Google alias that follows them around from employer to employer.
My name, Joe Flood, is not exactly common but it is far from unique. There’s an actor named Joe Flood (he shows up in iMdB) as well as a musician who seems to be increasing in popularity. I have joeflood.com and Joe Flood the musician has joeflood.net (I really should’ve registered that years ago). One day I’m #1 in google and the next day he is. He’s better known than I am but I’ve been on the web longer. He’s got a flash site while I just turned my site into a WordPress blog. It’s an interesting little SEO experiment.
It’s one thing for an adult to decide how “out there” she wants to be with her name and doings. But it just seems wrong to doom a kid to a lack of privacy in this way. There are plenty of other ways to become findable if it’s deemed desirable.
I would change my name to Gogol
http://mrinal.vox.com/library/post/now-anyone-can-be-a-goog-parent.html
with a name like mine, NOTHING helps. (though it does make googlism.com rather interesting)
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