Google Your Name/Personal Branding

I wanted to see how highly I could get a few sites to rank for my name as the search term. Some other guy (with my name) was ranking much higher, dominating the SERPS because he is in local politics and there are tons of news articles about him. This irritated me until I started this experiment, then it occurred to me that the SERPS for my name did not matter unless they showed something negative to prospective employers. I'm not a social media guru, so the results were not crucial to me, but seeing how the profiles ranked was interesting. All that I did was create a bunch of social media profiles and a couple of blank wordpress and blogspot blogs with my name in the domain, bookmark them all with delicious, and then use pingomatic on everything. It took about an hour and I did this on saturday, which is 5 days ago. I think the new SERPS are interesting...
His wordpress.com blog still ranks as number one in the SERPS. I didn't rank at all before, and I made sure my google profile had a link to every single social media profile I made. All of my search results are social media profiles and I only checked the SERPS in google:
My twitter profile is #2 (with a PR of 0), cliqset is #6, myspace page is # 8, google profile is #11, a whois result is #44, and a fricking email I sent to a webhost was used as an unauthorized testimonial with my name attached to it -- it shows up in the 60's and seriously ticked me off since it was unauthorized and never mentioned to me by the company. Everything else is about that politician, an actor, and other unrelated things. I only checked as far down as #100 in the results and was surprised to not see either of my blogs, friendfeed, disqus, technorati, or youtube accounts.

If I ever need to rank for my name I could just bookmark and ping the hell out of a linkwheel, but I'd be interested in seeing how other people rank for their names...

Edit: Adding my middle initial dumps me from the SERPS. Using my nickname puts twitter at #1 and cliqset at #3. My facebook profile doesn't rank anywhere even though I use my name. That's probably because I have the privacy settings locked down. (Apparently they work).

Cliqset. Who knew?

Last week I ranked for a fake name. I made sure the name didn't exist on Google anywhere. It sounds like a decently common name but anyways I hold the top 1-20 for the name if that even really means anything.

If you start using it as a pen-name, that could be useful. How much work did you put into it? I might eventually do a full on personal branding thing, so I wanted to see how difficult it would be to lock down the SERPS beforehand. It does not look hard. A few press releases and a solid about me/bio placed in the usual backlink places would work.

greyhatdude said:

If you start using it as a pen-name, that could be useful. How much work did you put into it? I might eventually do a full on personal branding thing, so I wanted to see how difficult it would be to lock down the SERPS beforehand. It does not look hard. A few press releases and a solid about me/bio placed in the usual backlink places would work.

Click to expand...

That's basically what I was trying to do. Create a fake person and make him the "dominate guru" in a particular field. Cool, professional name and easy to rank for it. Then the only problem is ranking for the niche you promote. Most SEO strategies tell you to include the niche in the name of the domain, but there is also a hidden strategy in only using a name.

Check this out, I think this is brand new and would help with personal branding...
https://www.google.com/dashboard/

I have the same name and even middle initial as some famous sports radio guy. He has like 8 pages on google. So I made up a new last name and now only have to compete with this hollywood special effects guy.

I'm ranked 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th on Google for my name...

...it's not that difficult considering my surname isn't that well known - and most of the sites with my name are ancient...

Right now the local politicians wordpress is #1, 2 facebook profiles are #2 and 3, my twitter profile is #4, a politics archive (that I can add myself to) is #5, my blogspot is #6, my myspace is #7, my cliqset is #8, 2 more politics related sites are #9 and 10, the next 5 SERPS are politics + a facebook profile, my google profile is #16, the next 14 are politics sites plus a youtube video and one more facebook profile. SO opening up the privacy features on my facebook profile would get me one more listing in that group, while I could create a linkwheel connecting all of those sites with the lower ranked ones, and then bookmark everything. I also haven't started posting on either blog yet. Using my name as a tag on each post would boost the blogs up in the serps, while posting videos of me on youtube would also probably break into #17 through 30. I would end up with 5 of the top 10 spots and two more in spots #11 through 30. I'm thinking about gradually cranking up the juice and self-promoting myself by starting a membership site, but I'm not sure that's a game I really want to play. Can you promote a membership site (like a squidoo for affiliate marketers) without promoting yourself, too?

SparkyBlue said:

I'm ranked 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th on Google for my name...

...it's not that difficult considering my surname isn't that well known - and most of the sites with my name are ancient...

Click to expand...

What sites are you ranking with? For example my twitter/myspace/facebook profiles all rank without any effort. I could use them to pass linkjuice to my lower-ranked sites.

Wiki pages and MP3 pages, and my facebook.

I was in a band for quite a few years, probably the exposure from that or the domain age of the sites. None of the sites are owned by me, though I can alter/drop links in them I suppose.

Check out hi5.com it lets you create YOURKEYWORD.hi5.com . Might be useful for other things.

Quick follow up:
The only profile listed in yahoo is my Friendfeed profile, while the only info on me in Bing is 8 SERP pages deep.... a link under my grandfathers Mylife background search profile.
Interesting little experiment.