Go Google Yourself

With over 1.5 billion people online (and more coming online each and everyday), the search results that show-up when you do a simple search on your own name can be confusing.

What do you do if there are other people with the same name as you? as you What do you do if the majority (or even some) of the content is old, outdated or, simply, wrong? Not everyone can be fortunate enough to have their own and constantly updated Wikipedia entry. Well, Google has something for you.

Have you created your own Google Profile yet? You should (here’s a peek at mine: Google Profiles – Mitch Joel).

According to The Official Google Blog yesterday on the post, Search for "me" on Google, you can fill out your own personal profile and have it actually rank on the first page of search results for your own, personal, name:

"To give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name, we’ve begun to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. These results offer abbreviated information from user-created Google profiles and a link to the full profiles. We’ve also added links so it’s easy to search for the same name on MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn."

You get quite a bit of functionality when filling out your profile, including the ability to add as many professional links, your photo, it seems to be pulling a mini-photo stream from Flickr as well, and you can even connect to those that may be interesting to you. No, it’s not quite as robust as LinkedIn. The point is not for this to be J.A.O.S.N. (Just Another Online Social Network). The point is to make people more searchable and findable in the Google engine.

Having your professional links and a full-on profile on a Google page can’t be a bad thing for your search engine optimization. 

If some of the smarter search engine folks have an issue with this content being on Google, please do share your thoughts in the comment below. Other than that, what are you waiting for… go fill in your Google Profile!