Popping by SEMScholar.com this morning, I read an interesting post by David Temple where he cites the fact that he has a slight reputation management issue when the top to SERP results for his name return details about an murderer called David Temple ! It actually struck a chord with me, because a few years ago there was a Paul Savage in Wales, who was murdered, thankfully the news story is no longer showing high up in the SERPS. But having people search for your name, and getting results that are less than complementary can indeed be dangerous to your reputation. What do you do when you find people are searching for you, but ranking for these terms is harder than you think ?
Looking at the google search results for Paul Savage, I see that a relevant result only appears on page 2. This could be due to many factors, such as:
- The name I have is really really popular – which it isn’t, well not along the lines of say “John Smith” anyway. Take “Yaro Starak“, google his first name and you’ll see that his sites come up first.
- The fact that there is some other high profile Paul Savage out there – more or less true as there is a Professor of Chemistry in Utah with the same name.
- Or just down to the sheer lack of links with the anchor text pointing to here – BINGO.
One hard part of link building is making sure that the links you get have a relevantly useful link text. This is easier said than done for links that you don’t have control over. Sometimes a simple note via emailing requesting a tweak could do the trick, but more often than not webmasters don’t have the time to go back and update all these various links.
So one short goal I have for the next few months is to start to register somewhere in the SERPS on the front page for my name. It’s always nice for people to find easily you when they are searching for you. Actually this is the reason why I link to the blogs I read via their real name, if you are not on the list, do let me know ! And before I go, any link love, with my name as an anchor text will be accepted with open arms 
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7.29.2008
Okay Paul, let’s see what we can do. By the way do you have linkedin, mybloglog or facebook pages. That would be a start. C’mon you’ve got to be more relevant that some professor, lol.
7.29.2008
Okay a few profiles added here. Let’s see how they get on, and how google and the other search engines associate them. Let’s see how they help.
Actually I need to update the linkedIn Profile when I get a chance !
7.31.2008
Done!
I had a similar enough problem with searches for ‘Cormac Moylan’ in Google and Yahoo. The results asked ‘Did you mean Cormac Nolan?’. Really really annoying.
I developed more anchored backlinks with my last name and I also commented on blogs using my first – last name instead of just my first.
Google dropped the ‘Did you mean?’ after about 5 or 6 weeks.
8.1.2008
Cheers Cormac (reciprocated). I think the replying to blogs with my full name is one of the main ways to go. I remember when you had the Cormac Nolan problem alright !