I Googled Myself!
All of the websites I host (including this one) have Google Analytics embedded. This allows me to analyze traffic sources, click patterns, time on site, etc. I use it more for the other sites than this one. As I was looking through the organic traffic sources (originating from search engines) I noticed that someone typed ( “taylor witt” ct) and landed on one of my html pages on taylorwitt.com.
I thought this was an odd keyword search for someone to enter; but thought that it could have been my professor of OPIM as we’re currently doing self discovery of what is written online about ourselves.
So I Googled myself using ( “taylor witt” ct ) and browsed the first two pages of results. The only thing that struck me as odd was an old apartment rental ad that I had posted over the summer. I noticed that result #3 was my URL http://www.taylorwitt.com/rental, which didn’t surprise me because I never took the ad down. What did strike me as odd is that the last result on page 1 was from http://www.showmetherent.rentlinx.com/Company.aspx?CompanyID=14024. I’m not sure why this site is using a sub-domain as a separate site (ineffective if you ask me), or another link on Page 2 of the Google search results, but my ads had syndicated to other rental websites. As it turns out, the way to remove my ad was to remove it from the source of the syndication (in this case it was RentLinx.com).
I also use Twitter to generate traffic leads to my website www.TheBitterBrewer.com. I noticed that some of my updates contain location sensitive information. Under Twitter’s options, I noticed an option to “Delete Location Data from Historical Tweets” so I used it. I also had my real name removed from the account.
2/13/10 Update
I searched my name again on Google and found that my Twitter updates still contain my first/last name even though I deleted the info from my Twitter profile. I assume it will take some time before Google indexes my Twitter updates again, so I sought out a way to remove my name from the search results sooner. I came across a Google utility called “Webpage Removal Request Tool” which allows a user to enter a URL to be removed or updated from their index. I submitted the following information today and will see how long it takes to get removed from Google’s index.
4/2/10 Update
I just watched a video on SEO (to add to the wiki page) and learned something interesting about Google’s search capabilities. You can type [site: "http://www.taylorwitt.com"] into Google and get results (and page counts) for any linking page in their database. When I just performed that search, I realized I had yet another apartment ad listed on Facebook under a group for Apartment Ads. I’ve since deleted the post.
4/17/10 Update
After reading “We Googled You” (HBR Case Study and Commentary) by Diane Coutu, Jeffrey A. Joerres, Michael Fertik, John G. Palfrey Jr., Danah M. Boyd I realized that continuous monitoring of information published about me is important. One approach I thought would allow me to do this is setting up a Google Alert with my name as the keywords, in quotes of course. I then wondered if Google Alert had an API that I could use to feed my blog. Unfortunately, it doesn’t, but I found way to implement such a solution using a third party API that uses screen scraping to accomplish it, but the link in this article is broken and screen scraping may violate Google’s terms of service.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/01/google-search-feeds-and-soap-api-not.html
4/18/10 Update
I received my first Google Alert already!
