
Ask HN: How to become the first result of a Google search for a name? - vojnovski
A while ago, I decided to write a simple personal landing page. I went about it as any average HN reader would, I googled what the best free way to deploy static html was. I went with Github pages + Cloudflare, as using S3 + Cloudfront did not justify mulling around with paying AWS. The ssl certificate is shared between several site, but oh well, it&#x27;ll do.<p>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&#x27;t seem to cache it. Lesson: Cloudflare does not edge-cache html, and you need a Page Rule to enable it via their interface.<p>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:&#x2F;&#x2F;google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com).<p>I confirmed I had a blazingly fast site via http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webpagetest.org&#x2F; and https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.keycdn.com&#x2F;, and then it was time to make Google return it when people searched for my full name.<p>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&#x27;t been already added.<p>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.<p>Any tips?<p>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.
======
amelius
Change your name into something more unique. For example,

    
    
        a975c295ddeab5b1a5323df92f61c4cc9fc88207

~~~
Bromskloss
Wait a minute…

[https://static.iseeme.com/photo-upload-
templates/BKC400/dedi...](https://static.iseeme.com/photo-upload-
templates/BKC400/dedication-
template-a975c295ddeab5b1a5323df92f61c4cc9fc88207.png)

~~~
esnard
sha1("date\n") == "a975c295ddeab5b1a5323df92f61c4cc9fc88207"

~~~
Bromskloss
Haha, this is even more baffling! How did you know that?

PS: Might it have come from a botched attempt to hash the current date?

~~~
amelius
Yes, it's true. I think I can explain it as follows. I wanted to type:

    
    
        date | sha1sum
    

Then another part of my brain decided to type:

    
    
        echo "blah blah gibberish" | sha1sum
    

But then I ended up typing:

    
    
        echo date | sha1sum
    

I suspect you could reverse engineer that with standard password cracking
techniques.

------
sixhobbits
It definitely helps to have a unique name, but it's possible without. A lot of
good advice in this thread, but as someone who achieved what you want, some
extra points:

* 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 :)

~~~
tedmiston
I'll second the point about creating a hub. I've pushed my personal site +
blog to the first page for my name using this technique.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=Taylor+Edmiston&ie=UTF-8&oe=...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Taylor+Edmiston&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-
us&client=safari)

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.

~~~
eccfcco15
FYI, it looks like you have an expired SSL cert on your website.

~~~
tedmiston
Thanks, I'll get that taken care of.

------
Mz
Your site is basically empty. Current content:

 _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.

~~~
kostarelo
Fyi, it's "Republic of Macedonia".

~~~
r3bl
If you wanna be correct and not upset the Greeks, it's "Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia".

~~~
Piskvorrr
Which in turn upsets another set of people. There isn't, AFAIK, a non-
offensive designation for this area.

------
kough
1\. Get your full name as a .com (victorvojnovski.com) 2\. Put any real
content on it. Maybe a blog? Helps to have links back. 3\. Wait a few years.
4\. Success!

~~~
tobltobs
> Get your full name as a .com (victorvojnovski.com)

Do this NOW. Seriously.

~~~
vojnovski
Done. It seems it can't hurt, even if it only redirects to the .mk tld one.

~~~
8ig8
I’d do it the other way around. Redirect .mk to .com.

~~~
saas_co_de
definitely.

------
35bge57dtjku
> 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...

The reason for you omitting content isn't going to magically increase your
pagerank.

------
janesvilleseo
Ironically, this post will actually help you achieve what you are looking to
do. As another has mentioned it is now on page 1 for me. And as another has
said search results are now personalized.

So how do you get it to #1 for your name. Content can help but is not 100%
needed in this case. Your name is rather unique. I am in the similar situation
as I have a fairly unique name too.

So what I recommend is making your site a destination. Make sure all your
social profiles link to the domain. Reference your name in the link where
possible. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Github, etc.

Lastly as someone else has mentioned, give it some time. It will move up as
you build up the importance of the website.

And if you want, while you could change domains to include your name, you
could also just have a page (url) that has your full name in it.

------
cdibona
To some degree, this is a Sisyphean task: Google doesn't have one solitary
index or signal anymore, it's extremely personalized. So even if you are
number one for you, it's extremely likely that you won't be for much of the
rest of the world.

And this assumes you have a unique-ish name/site/project.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
You could at least get a better idea by searching with the !g bang through
DDG. It won't solve the problem of other people's personal filters, but at
least you'll get an objective result not based on your own.

~~~
tedmiston
Since !g just redirects to a normal Google search url, I don't see how this
would be any different than searching Google directly.

------
chenshuiluke
Don't worry about making your personal site the first result. Having your name
spread out across multiple sites can help give searchers a more wholistic view
of who are and what you have done in the past that makes you stand out.

Here's what I did: I negotiated with my parents before I was born to give me a
unique name.

I made a github profile with lots of projects.

I wrote a short crappy book for Amazon Kindle.

I was involved with a local organization's student opensource initiative (like
a small Google summer of code) and they have me mentioned in various articles.

I made a LinkedIn profile.

I made a youtube channel from when I was a kid in 2008 and have many videos.

I wrote a piece of fan fiction way back when.

I probably should add my name to my various personal project sites...

~~~
perryprog
>Here's what I did: I negotiated with my parents before I was born to give me
a unique name.

Yeah, this is really helpful for SEO, so if you haven't done this yet for your
personal site, go do that!

------
hluska
Hey Viktor....

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.

------
codebeaker
Your site is all but completely devoid of content, no wonder Google isn't
ranking it as relevant. Try writing some content first.

------
jakub_g
Just to counter all the advice in this thread:

my personal website was whole 2 pages of static content (landing page with not
much content + 1 blog article) until very recently, and hosted under
.github.io domain (bought a custom domain only recently), and it very quickly
became top-3 google search under my name.

However I think the problem here might be due to using .mk domain and Google
thinking that it's not very international. Note that when you search on
[https://www.google.mk/?hl=mk](https://www.google.mk/?hl=mk) then it shows up
on the first page.

Getting .com/.net/.io and putting just a bit more unique content is probably a
good way to get started. Put a 301 redirect from old domain to the new one.
Put a link on LinkedIn etc. if not done yet. Then just be patient.

BTW Hello from Nice - 230 fellow here.

------
rampage101
There are no simple hacks to get to the top. You need people to be searching
for your name, find your link, and then spend time on the page. It helps a lot
if you have posts that show up on Reddit, or other social networks.

Since there is no content at all on your site there's no way anybody will stay
on your page.

~~~
throw_away2
How does Google figure out if visitors stayed on the page? Chrome telemetry
(creepy)? Google Analytics (are you required to use this to get a good
ranking)?

~~~
slig
If a user clicks on a link on a search page, stays a few seconds on the new
page and then press 'back', and clicks on another link on the search, that's a
pretty strong signal to Google that the first link wasn't that good.

~~~
twosville
Hmmm. If true, I wonder if cmd-clicking the top N links into other tabs can be
distinguished or if it's harmful for their ranking. Also, does going back
cause a reload?

~~~
slig
I'd guess that various clicks in a small time frame can be trivially detected
and discarded as noise. The vast majority of the users do not use that
pattern.

I don't think it causes a reload, but it can also be trivially detected using
JavaScript.

------
sirwitti
The domain name itself is one of the most important factors for google. Apart
from that your h1 says welcome and has an <hr> inside. If you put your name in
the h1 it's gonna help your ranking.

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

~~~
Hasz
Is there a significant penalty to having a domain name where the ccTLD
finishes the word (youtu.be)?

~~~
vojnovski
The Google Search Console has a International Targeting section, where it
associates your site with a country, which influences "how your site appears
in search results, and improves our search results for geographic queries."
This can be disabled.

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](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399)

.be is not in the list.

------
kelukelugames
Sort of related. In college when facebook first started, we had a page called
"The Michael Lees of Berkeley" with dozens of members. One of the Michael Lees
is on the no fly list which has been a hassle for the others.

------
elorant
Since we're in the SEO land let me ask a relevant question. Say I have an
e-commerce site. If I buy an expired domain from some other e-commerce site
which was in the same market as mine can I have any benefit whatsoever?

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Yes. This is now a common white hat tactic. That instead of paying someone to
try and build links for you (blindly email a bunch of sites and ask for
links). You purchase a site and then direct all of that traffic to a subdomain
of your site / 301 the entire domain over / 301 specific URLs over to the new
resources (which one of these that makes sense is case specific).

~~~
elorant
Nice. So how much should I pay for an expired domain in case it's already
taken? Up to say a couple hundred bucks or more?

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Like everything -> it depends.

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).

------
foopod
Do all the things.

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](https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=jono+shields)

~~~
tyingq
Interesting that you didn't mention inbound links. Despite all their anti spam
efforts, Google rankings are still mostly about who has the most inbound links
from the most prominent sites. Pagerank[1] still seems to trump everything
else, content, relevance, etc.

[1][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank)

------
FightingTaco
I've struggled with similar issues. From what I've read, it's all about
getting other more established sites to link back to your page. I believe the
easiest way to do this might be to start blogging or host original content in
some form.

------
SXX
As others suggested full name in domain name and title might have something to
do with it, but I'll also suggested to add few external links to it even if
it's just links from random internet forums you rarely usimg and such.

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.

------
tonymet
just buy paid adwords for your name. the cpc will be rock-bottom (no one else
is buying) and you won't pay very often. Prob $5/mo tops

~~~
UweSchmidt
Can you elaborate? Does google reward you if you pay up? It cannot possibly be
about the ad that is generated somewhere?

~~~
tedmiston
He's saying that you'll be able to easily get the ad space that appears above
the list of unsponsored results. Since your name is a relatively unique
phrase, it's unlikely other people would compete for those ads, so your cost
should be low.

------
tobltobs
If your target are also users from outside of the Republic of Macedonia then
forget the .mk domain. Use a generic tld.

------
egypturnash
The first link I get for "Viktor Vojnovski" is what I assume is your twitter.
Which has a link to your site. Isn't that good enough?
[https://twitter.com/vojnovski?lang=en](https://twitter.com/vojnovski?lang=en)

And your site is like link number five on the first results page for me. So
that's climbing the ranks pretty fast.

I have done absolutely zero SEO and my personal site (egypt.urnash.com) is the
first result for every search for "egypt urnash" I've ever done on any search
engine. I have also had this URL be my main presence on the internet for at
least a decade, I've lost track. There's a ton of content on there with lots
of links pointing to it, too. Have patience. And put some stuff on your site.

------
bsvalley
PART I: If you're looking to improve your Page Rank you need to understand the
basics of SEO. Basically you need to increase your Domain/Page Authorities.
How? By creating links to your web pages from domains that have high
authorities... e.g. Reddit, Hacker News, etc. You get a huge bonus if your
website is being mentioned by other big websites within the same categories.
If you're selling cars and your website is mentioned on dog.com, it might
boost your authority but not the quality of this reference (also known as the
Spam Score).

PART II: Let's say we're back in the 90's and you just purchased the domain
name pizza.com, assuming your website is about pizzas... then forget PART I,
you'll rank #1.

------
ronilan
Like this:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=ron+ilan](https://www.google.com/search?q=ron+ilan)

(Best is to get a dot com domain a decade ago and add some links. Works for
every name noun and adjective.)

------
laksjd
Your full name does not appear at all in the human readable text of your
website...

------
seanwilson
Your website needs to have high quality content and you need high quality
websites linking to your website to rank better. Tweaking the speed and server
setup isn't productive until you've done this.

------
meatsock
a good way to do this is chosing a very unique username.

    
    
        - sincerely, meatsock.

------
pvtmert
first of all, i think you made it over complicated. just gh-pages and
cloudflare would work very well. you might need raw storage for your images
and stuff use something like imgur.

increase those: \- number of external links in your website \- number of links
to your website from external resources make them available in your public
profile, fb, twitter, linkedin, github etc.

make your site multi paged somehow. so it will seen as resourceful (eg. you
can make intro in the main page but add pages that explains how you did in
some project and link them with first page)

include links of websites of companies you worked for

for fonts use googlefonts or some cdn, use same stuff for external resources
this will have your site linked with billion visitor domains

have proper mobile version have https properly configured with hsts ^ these
are important, use page speed insights to increase those

btw i didnt do anything much but when searched my domain comes in #3rd place,
first 2 are linkedin and github. name is "mert akengin" domain is n0pe.me for
reference.

------
nnd
Does Google still prefer .com TLD over others? I moved from it to a country-
based TLD and have similar problems with indexing now.

~~~
stevekemp
I think it depends - I've owned "steve.org.uk" since the nineties and I used
to be the first result for searches for both "steve" and "steve kemp" in the
UK.

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!)

------
Veen
Content and links. If there are lots of competing search results for the same
query, one of the factors that Google uses to rank them is the number and
quality of the sources of incoming links.

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.

------
beavis2
Change your name to something unique.

~~~
vojnovski
It is quite unique. Almost all of the results in the first three Google result
pages are legitimate, mostly pointing to a plethora of social networks
profiles.

edit: put original edit in sub-comment.

~~~
gilleain
Quite unique? There is one other internet user with my first name and I once
accidentally got signed up to a social network account meant for him.

Your name is either unique or it isn't...

~~~
vojnovski
Unique as in I can't find anyone else with my name+surname on the internet.
Quite, as in I can't be sure that a person with that name does not exist
(short of a SHA-1/MD5 hash as suggested above, but even there one cannot be
sure: [https://security.googleblog.com/2017/02/announcing-first-
sha...](https://security.googleblog.com/2017/02/announcing-first-
sha1-collision.html)). :)

------
hayksaakian
I see it on the first page, so it seems like google has come around to it by
now.

------
vojnovski
Can't seem to edit the original post any more, so here goes an update.

Thanks HN! [https://vv.mk/](https://vv.mk/) is now on the first page of a my
name search on google.com.

------
dsfyu404ed
Have a unique name and commit a crime that makes the news.

Probably not the kind of advice you're looking for. You should define the
scope better. ;)

------
askvictor
Maybe it would help to have your name on the webpage (other than in the title
block)?

------
hnarayanan
You need at least a bit of interesting content!

------
danso
edit: other people have said what would be my reflexive suggestion: a domain
name that is actually your name would likely get a lot of search ranking
juice. Besides having a meta title of your name, you need to have an h1 tag --
and not just the html; it should _look_ like a major headline -- with your
name, as opposed to what it is now ("Welcome").

Here's an easy fix:

    
    
         <h1>Welcome to Viktor Vojnovski's homepage</h1>
    
    
    
    

\------------

> _but it seems logical that a personal website would be returned as the first
> result._

Does it? If I'm an employer researching a job candidate, and the job candidate
has bought their own vanity domain but left it empty of worthwhile content,
would visiting that page be a better use of my time than that candidate's
Twitter, LinkedIn, or public Facebook page?

The fact that your page itself lists these social media URLs makes your
homepage, theoretically, more useful in a broad kind of sense. But it's not
obviously more useful than just directly seeing your tweets on first click.

And on a quasi-technical note, think of the heuristic/algorithmic hoops
Google's search engine would have to resolve in order to rank a page like
yours over Twitter and LinkedIn:

1\. LinkedIn page is ranked first because LinkedIn is an extremely popular
site.

2\. Random webpage that links to LinkedIn page should get quality points
because it also purportedly links to the person's other social URLs, and a
normal human being would find that useful.

I know Google search logic and variety of signals is quite complicated and
probably handles situations like these, but think of how easy it might be to
game such a heuristic that gives pages quality points based on the quality of
pages that they link to. That's almost exactly backwards of the original
Google BackRub algorithm.

Other than getting legit sites to link to you (putting the URL in your Twitter
bio might help, though Twitter renders it with a nofollow tag), your easiest
bet to get higher is to add content to your site. A blog with intermittent
updates would be ideal, but are you really unable to write a public-facing
biography for yourself?

The ultimate question is: the purpose of Google and the Web are not to make
things nice for any one user. Ideally, Google surfaces results that it thinks
humans actually would be satisfied on clicking on. Let's imagine that someone,
anyone out of the billions of Internet users on any given day, decides to
search for your name.

Can you put yourself in the place of that user and honestly believe you'd be
satisfied with landing on your basically empty homepage? Web users don't
benefit from all the meta optimizations that you've added, they are there for
the content.

------
pknerd
Make your Google Plus Profile.

