I am one of the tens of Venkat Ramakrishnans out there in the web. Like everyone else, my social profiles are special to me. I, like everyone else, pay attention to SEO, and would like to have my professional links like LinkedIn to be displayed among the top ones.
People trust Google search. They first go to Google Search to search for something they want to know about. This is in spite of myriad of other options like DuckDuckGo, Bing, Ecosia, and several other good-enough ones but not as popular as Google Search.
But alas, Google Search has loads of issues. For one, it mixes up people names when they display the content results. For example, I searched for my own name Venkat Ramakrishnan in Google and I got the following search result (somewhere on Top 20 results):
So, what’s wrong with this entry? I am NOT an Agile SW Testing consultant or a trainer. I don’t primary profess TDD, Unit Testing, Clean Code, API Testing, Automation, nor am I an international keynote speaker. I am an author, but not a technology author (as of now).
So, what’s going on? This CONTENT description is some other Venkat Ramakrishnan’s, although if I click on this link, it takes me to MY LinkedIn profile! What a bummer!
So, I contacted LinkedIn. They say they have propagated all the correct values (names, description, number of followers, position, etc.) to search engines and it is not their problem. I checked Bing and DuckDuckGo. They display my profile, description, etc. correctly.
So, apparently, Google Search is the culprit. While we work tirelessly to make our presence and voice heard in the Internet where attention span is a few seconds, Google Search is helping us so much is making that happen (pssst, that’s a sarcasm!).
The replies from Google sometimes is very authoritative! ‘Oh it takes several weeks for the changes to propagate in search engines!’ Very well, my profile title has changed a month back and still we are sitting with a mixed-up entry.
So much for our efforts in SEO and having our voice heard. Apparently, Google Search is not a equal-opportunity search engine and care only for top-notch authoritative entries. Well, at least, get the name, description, etc. right in your SERP!
Google Search needs be fixed, no doubt. They better pay attention.
Note: The content of this article is purposefully NOT optimzed for SEO.