I’m re-posting an entry I wrote 5 years ago. It still applies. Back then, Googling yourself was a relatively new concept. Now, it’s a truism that Google results are your home page.
Posted May 19, 2004: “Google yourself.” That’s today’s pithy two-word tip from personal branding guru William Arruda.
As he puts it: “Being Googled reveals how visible you are on the Web, and visibility (at least among your target audience) is critical to successful personal branding. Your Google results also become useful data points for those who are looking to make decisions about you.”
So… I googled him. 24,700 results for Arruda (now 73,600). #1 points to his site.
Then I googled yours truly. 77,900 results (today 143,000). #1 is this blog. Which proves that search engines love blogs. (Update: note that debbieweil.com is a blog AND a site. It’s built on Expression Engine.) This blog (started June 2003) is less than a year old. Whereas my (old) site, WordBiz.com (no longer live), has been up since 1995. I.e. it came up lower in search results.
Here are a few more: Seth Godin: 136,000 results (now 1.77 million). Ralph F. Wilson: 637,000 results (now 944,000). Martin Luther King: 2.48 million results (now 17.6 million). Seamus Heaney (my favorite poet): 76,800 (now 554,000).
Look at the doubling, tripling and exponentially greater increases in search results. Now do you get the explosion of content on the Web that everyone’s talking about?!
Useful Links
Why Google Wants You to Google Yourself (explains why Google wants you to create a “Google profile”)
I googled the phrase Google yourself: 76.2 million results.