SEO Spot-Check: What Links Rank Highest on my Online Profile?

As promised last week, we’ve completed our study of news, indexes, and social networking sites rank highest on an individual’s Google profile.

A person’s “Google Profile” is the list of links on the “SERPs” (search engine results pages) resulting from “query,” or “search,” on Google for a person’s name. In online profile building, it is preferable that the first couple of pages worth of links (the first 20 links) provide accurate, positive information about that person. To build our profiles, therefore, it is helpful to know which links are likely to show up on those first couple of pages of a Google search.

To evaluate this, we chose thirty-six names of individuals, from various industries and various levels of name recognition, and tallied the types of websites that showed up on the first two pages of Google under their names. All of the people chosen are known by the public in some way – either as artists, entertainers, writers, educators, bloggers, politicians, etc.. To prevent the possibility of anyone trying to manipulate their profiles as a result of their names showing on this published study, we have chosen not to print the names we used. If a name received multiple links from the same category, that category was counted only once.

Following is the list of the top 12 link categories, and the number of times websites in the category appeared on the first two pages of each of the thirty-six Google profiles, expressed as a percentage of XX/36. For example, if the links from the category appeared on 34 of 36, or 34/36 individuals’ SERPs, the category on the table below would show a 94% SERPs rating. Note that all of the profiles had links in numerous categories, so the percentages added up vertically will not equal 100%.

Link Category	Amount of time this category was utilized on the 36 sample profiles
Niche/Industry Media*	94%
Own Website, Blog, Domain	94%
Mentions on Others’ Blogs, Forums, and Websites	86%
YouTube, GoogleVideo, VodPod, other video	72%
Wikipedia, Niche Wikis, Info Directories: Answers, Infoplease, About, Woopidoo, BrainyQuotes	72%
Amazon, IMBD Google Books&Movies, Reviews, MetaCafe	56%
Social Networks: Facebook, Linked-IN, MySpace, Twitter, Newsvine, Digg	53%
MSM: Alphabet Media, Newspapers, TV, Radio websites	50%
iRadio, Podcasting Sites: BTR, Music, AOL, Last.fm, MTV, Rhapsody, Vh1, mp	39%
Registries, Indexes, and Feeds: FriendFeed, feedage, NNDB, 123People, Zoominfo, BusinessCard2, Naymz, Plaxo, Technorati, Blog Catalog, Daylife, Classmates, Adoption Reg, Geneology, Meetup	28%
Photos: Google Images, Wikimedia, flikr	25%
Blogger, Wordpress, Wix, Yahoo, Geocities, MSN, Google	25%

 

*Niche/Industry publications specialize in the profilee’s own line of work etc..
Examples of niche/industry sites are CMT.com, in country music, and
Townhall.com in political news and commentary.

Clearly, in this spot-check, the links most valuable to the thirty-six Google profiles studied were links from niche and industry blogs, and the profilee’s own domain, website and blog(s). Also valueable were links from other blogs, forums and websites, from video sites, and from wikis and other information directories.