Ask HN: How to become the first result of a Google search for a name?
I reused an old domain (vv.mk), that I had previously used for a Blogger blog, spent some time playing with latencies, as my page loaded in a second and a half, and Cloudflare didn't seem to cache it. Lesson: Cloudflare does not edge-cache html, and you need a Page Rule to enable it via their interface.
I learnt a bit about webfonts, and finally decided to host the fonts myself (on Github pages), rather than do a roundtrip to google, as it added about 300ms on average to page load, using a setup that would work for most recent browsers (https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com).
I confirmed I had a blazingly fast site via http://www.webpagetest.org/ and https://tools.keycdn.com/, and then it was time to make Google return it when people searched for my full name.
To my chagrin, this does not seem to be easy. I added my name to the title and the description HTML meta tags. I added the domain to the Google Search Console in all its versions (www, no-www, http, https), asked the Google crawler to cralw it and update its index. I added links to it to my social networks profiles where they hadn't been already added.
A day after, the Google index is not updated, my site, along with the description of the content that it had up to a day ago, is buried well into the 4th Google results page. My google searches on SEO of personal websites have been completely unfruitful. The 1st Google results page is still populated with useful info (most of my social network profiles), but it seems logical that a personal website would be returned as the first result.
Any tips?
edit: Most of the comments suggest this is due to the lack of content. While I accept this might be a cause for the bad ranking, the lack of content is quite intentional, the page is meant to be a sort of a personal landing page with links to social networks profiles, workplaces, etc.
87 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 95.7 ms ] threadedit: put original edit in sub-comment.
Your name is either unique or it isn't...
(Best is to get a dot com domain a decade ago and add some links. Works for every name noun and adjective.)
How do you get links? You put something on the site that's worth linking to and promote it. There isn't really a shortcut here.
Do this NOW. Seriously.
But it also wont help a bit.
There aren't too many facts in the SEO world, most is snake oil and stuff that worked ages ago. But to redirect a .com to a .mk is pretty sure a non optimal solution if you are interested in users from outside of Macedonia.
The other important signal is backlinks to your domain from social networks with your name. These will indicate that the domain is authoritative for the name on the social profile.
I've had my full name as a .com for about 20 years now, with plenty of content on the site. Over the years I've watched it slip down the search results and it is now on page 10 when you search for my firstname lastname where my domain is firstnamelastname.com
But then again I have a more common name than victorvojnovski including a D-list celebrity, evangelical country musician, and retail store with the same name.
Also, next year the trend may be to register ".io", etc. You might end up on a slippery slope, paying $100 per year for something that you don't really need.
> paying $100 per year for something that you don't really need.
That is what he is doing now. Paying 100$ per year for a useless .mk domain when the .com would cost 10$.
Since there is no content at all on your site there's no way anybody will stay on your page.
I don't think it causes a reload, but it can also be trivially detected using JavaScript.
There is no content at all on this site. If you want to get up in the rankings you need to provide content that is relevant to your name.
Btw the html entities you're using miss a semicolon which is invalid html. I think google likes valid html better :)
Hope that helps, Martin
They have some ccTLDs which do not automatically associate your domain to a specific country as specified here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399
.be is not in the list.
https://static.iseeme.com/photo-upload-templates/BKC400/dedi...
PS: Might it have come from a botched attempt to hash the current date?
I googled your domain (vv.mk) and, if I were in your shoes, I would wait for a few days and see if your website ranks. The cached version still seems to point at Blogger. I don't read Macedonian (assuming that Google Translate picked the correct language), but the cached title is still "Free your mind".
If I were in your shoes, I would:
1.) Assume that it will take at least a week or two to re-index your site and start ranking your new content.
2.) Add some content. One of the most surefire ways to get Google to respond to content changes is to add a metric shit tonne of new content.
And this assumes you have a unique-ish name/site/project.
1. Full name as a .com helped me. Put your name in the page content too, whether it is a heading or a footer.
2. Content. Content. Content. Google needs a good reason to put your site at the top.
3. Site needs to be mobile friendly.
4. Use webmaster tools. Use Data Highlighter to show google what parts of your page are important. Make sure structured meta data is okay too.
5. Google Products, why wouldn't google prioritize sites with Google tag manager where they can learn even more about your sight and their customers.
Proof: https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=jono+shields
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
And yeah not that it will improve position of your page, but adding google analitics and veryfying your page in google webmaster always help with getting it indexed faster especially if page might get some visitors. And if you dont like Google you can always remove it afterwards.
Nothing of sort would work of you were John Smith, but considering your name about as unique as mine this should work.
* Don't focus on one site. Spread your content around on as many sites as possible and link each one back to your home page. This is easier than you might expect -- nearly all tech sites are looking for content creators, whether or not they explicitly advertise it.
* Don't expect it to happen in a matter of days. It took me months/years to push "Gareth Dwyer" the poker player off the front page of google, and all he had was some YouTube page. It takes weeks for Google to update their indexes sometimes (even changing a big site over from no-www to www recently took several weeks to properly reflect on Google).
* The URL is important. Get a .com or another 'more official' domain. This is a grey/changing area, but people still have pretty big biases based on TLDs, and this affects click-through and therefore ranking. I wouldn't click on vv.mk unless I was actually in Macedonia and expecting it.
* And as others have said, put more content on your site. Even if it's only a landing page, you want people to spend a minute or so looking around. If it has a high bounce rate, it'll hurt your rankings.
Good luck :)
https://www.google.com/search?q=Taylor+Edmiston&ie=UTF-8&oe=...
I link back to it from everywhere, especially my social profiles.
The blog is more important in terms of content, so I'm planning to transition to that being my main hub with everything else as a profile page on that site eventually.
I also previously had the rest of the first page with my social profiles until someone with the same name as me got arrested and convicted of murder, and that press sunk my links to page two. On top of that, another person with the same name is getting married and their marriage sites are ahead too but I think that's temporary and they'll sink afterwards. I've started including my middle initial in social profiles which helps differentiate.
Probably not the kind of advice you're looking for. You should define the scope better. ;)
A grey/black hat SEO tactic is to use that domain as part of a PBN (private blog network). Basically manufacturing backlinks to boost your money site.
This is part of why people buy sites on Flippa or Borderline.biz or whatever. There's a lot of factors that go into it: is it still getting traffic? Is it reputable? Is it listed as a malware site? How closely related to your own site it is, etc.
If you're starting out on a new project and would like to get almost _any_ organic SEO traffic in the first year of your existence, you should probably buy a domain (domain age is that strong of a ranking factor).
Now I've relocated to Finland and I happened to do so just as steve.fi was expiring. So I've migrated to that domain as the lack of nested domain is easier to handle.
I'm still in the top five for "Steve Kemp", but personalized searches make it a little hard to tell. (My biggest problem is that there are a bunch of sites that link to the baseball player, who shares my name, including wikipedia etc. Hard to outrank that!)
Welcome.
Hi, I'm Viktor. More to come, in the meantime you can contact me via twitter, linkedin, or via email at <my name> at <the domain this site is on>.
More links and a pgp key at Keybase.
Made with ️ in Nice.
Should say something more like:
Welcome.
Hi, I'm Viktor Vojnovski. I do (stuff you do, reasons why people would look for you online). You can also find me on twitter @vojnovski. Here is my linkedin profile. You can email me via ViktorVojnovski at <this domain name>.
I can also be found on Keybase.
Made with ️ in Nice, France.
As others have said, it really should be ViktorVojnovski.com.
Edited to reflect updated location info.
Re your update. My suggested edits don't add a lot more words. But they do replace completely empty fluff ("More to come, in the meantime ...") with actual useful info. That empty fluff is apparently also a lie if there is no intent to actually add more info.