Google wants you to profile yourself and it all sounds so inviting. A Google profile is simply how you present yourself on Google products to other Google users. It allows you to control how you appear on Google and tell others a bit more about who you are.
As an extra inducement, they now give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name by showing Google profile results at the bottom of name-query search pages, at least in the U.S. and Canada.
Danny Sullivan has an excellent article on the mechanics of how Google profile results improve people search. Barry Schwartz has also provided details on the slightly clunky way you can verify your google profile. Since this is all linked to social networking, you might have thought it would link in with Orkut, their ailing attempt to create a social space. Not so, in fact it requires you to at least create a profile in their Knol space, even if you do not feel the urge to add to the fund of human knowledge.
I wondered how many people are going along with Google in creating profiles. It seemed to me that a good test would be to check out some of the 38 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization that had contributed to the SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors Version 2 study. This is how they seemed to be working with profiles, at the time this was written. Clearly results may change over time.
Google Profiles for SEO leaders |
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| Good Profile with Verified Name (7) corrected April 27, 2008 |
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| Good Profile with Non-Verified Name (10) | |
| Minimal profile (6) | |
| No Profile (15) |
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It will be interesting to see how this evolves over time. As Marshall Kirkpatrick points out You Can Change What Google Says About You whenever you wish.
Google also offers a way of deleting your Google profile, if you feel that is to your advantage. However it adds the somewhat ominous Note: Once you delete your profile, you won’t be able to get it back. Given that it is unclear how Google profiles might be used in the future, that leaves you with a somewhat risky decision.
WoW, it sounds so interesting and promising to me, Barry. I would definitely spend some time to get myself a Google Profile as well!
Hey having links from folders on google is awesome! why wouldnt you want to do this?
Actually, Barry, since I do have 2 profiles, it should be noted that the one with my real name DOES have a verified name. The DazzlinDonna one doesn’t because, well, really, it’s not a name, so how can I verify it? That’s the profile you linked to, but this one http://www.google.com/profiles/donna.d.fontenot is verified.
Sorry, Donna, I did not spot that. I’ll amend the table to show that correctly.
Hi Barry,
Not on your list but I do have a profile. http://www.google.com/profiles/110566958667439985502 I’ll be darned if I can see how to have it verified though
Just open an account at Knol (http://knol.google.com/), Arnie, and that should do the trick. You do not need to create any Knol pages, all you have to do is turn up.
I do have a Knol account too Barry. I am pretty sure they are under the same log-in, but I will double check.
I think the google profile is nice, but not everyone is gotten around to using it. It is still pretty new, and i’m sure it will take off when more people realize it can make them more desirable.
Not sure I am really hot on this idea. Visions of cyber stalking come to mind
The way I see it, why not control another spot on Google for your name? Mine comes up #10 right now on a vanity search, and even has my little icon there. Gotta love that. And even though it’s possible that Google might not give it a whole lotta weight, it’s a link from Google.com and any chance that it ends up having SEO value is worth the few minutes to set it up IMO. Might have some value for SEO, if not just for rep management. We’ll see how it pans out.
Google Profile exposes email id to others ,so I don’t prefer google profile
I would have preferred vanity URLs in google profiles, my biggest concern is that profile is directly related to email id. Unlike yahoo, google has only two email domains. In yahoo you could create a country specific email address and risked less spam.