Who Would be Looking For Me?
Posted On: 2006-10-18
What would they find if they did?
I was wandering through some of our Adsense stats yesterday when I noticed that some income had just been generated by one of my mainstream sites. It came as a bit of a surprise because the site is so new and I only had one or two links pointing to it from other sites.
Obviously though one of the search engines had found it and was returning it in a reasonable spot on a search engine results page for a term quite a few people were searching for. Of course I wanted to know more so I went to the server stats for the site and while it didn't tell me much about where the Adsense hits had come from it did show me that someone had got to the site by searching for my name.
So off I went to the big three to have a look at what they would tell me about me. It's amazing how much information is out there on search engines about individuals and I found listings relating to us as far back as the first few weeks we were online in 1996.
So if you have never done a search for your name you should try it, you never know what it might turn up. Fortunately for me none of the search engines disclosed anything I would not want people to know about me but perhaps things might be different for you.
The amount of personal information that search engines do contain about individuals is one of the scary things about the Internet. You don't even have to be searching for an individual to pick up some personal information that most people would rather not be so public.
Just last week Google won a court case brought by a public accountant over the details shown in the big G's listing for his website. It seems that if you do a search for public accountants you get all the normal listings but under his listing you will find a reference to a complaint brought against him by a state body that has some control over his profession.
That's hardly the sort of information anyone would want to have out there in the public view but we can expect to see more of it in future. Perhaps that's why some people are beginning to set up business in the field of public image protection.
What would they find about your website?
Another way to look after your public image on search engines – or the public image of your websites is to spend some time working on it yourself. When one of your sites appears on a search engine results page what doe people see?
Obviously they are going to see whatever you happen to have in the title tag and that's important because that's almost like a headline that catches a surfer's eye but what do they see underneath that?
In Google they are going to see whatever you might have in the meta description tag and whatever that might be will have a direct impact on whether or not they go ahead and click on the link to go to your site. MSN will look to data from DMOZ (if you happen to be listed there) and Yahoo takes data from any listing you might have in their directory.
But wherever the various search engines take it from will the surfers see text that combines with the ‘headline' and encourages them to click through to your site? Or will they see a whole bunch of keywords stuffed into the meta description tag?
This is one area where you do have control over what surfers will see ... unless of course you've paid heaps of money to Yahoo and they have ignored your title tag. That's happened to more than one person who paid their $300 to get included in the Yahoo directory in the hope of getting some great traffic.
It seems that Yahoo is quite happy to take your money and your title tag and change it to whatever they might think appropriate. From the reports I've seen few people are happy with the changes and traffic from the Yahoo search engine results pages generally dries up.
Reading those reports lately has certainly made me think twice about whether or not I want to buy a listing in the Yahoo directory.
So, while you may not have much control over what people find when they go looking for you there is no doubt that you do have control over what people find when they go looking for your website. You should be working hard to make sure that people see what you want them to see and not just what the search engines think is appropriate.