My name is Matthew Bredel and as of March, 2007, I am a full-time, work-at-home internet marketer.
For close to 10 years, I worked for a defense company which was an OK job, but I was so uninspired in life and frankly, I needed some more money. That is when I first discovered internet marketing! Now I admit that I didn't start making thousands in my first couple of months (in fact, I lost my shirt!), but I finally saw the "internet light"...
Are we becoming whores to the internet? Google Profiles is now a reality and you can now tell Google who you are and Google will even included this in their index. So my question is: how much more of your anonymity are you willing to give Google for a little bit of social marketing and SEO love.
I saw this article this morning (Now You Can Change What Google Says About You) and I was a bit intrigued, excited and well, a bit nervous too.
So here is the deal…you can now create your own “profile page” on Google. Hmmm…is it just me or is this sounding very “Public Facebook”-y?
I wanted to get a better feel about this whole thing so I quickly went and created my own personal profile (you can do this at the new Google Profiles site). The process really only takes a few minutes and it is like everything else online (aka, a profile page of your name, description, a picture of yourself, a plugin to your Flickr or Picassa account for photos…and your website links.)
Hmmm…website links you say?
And not only web links, but you can create some pretty awesome anchor text for each link, too. (If you don’t know what I am talking about, you need to start watching my SEO Exciter videos now!).
Let’s dig in a bit further…are they using “nofollow” links?
(*I preface this in stating that the effectiveness of rel=”nofollow” is highly debateable right now, but I personally feel that there is some relevance and significance in the nofollow statement. For inbound links, I ALWAYS prefer to have no rel=”nofollow” on the link!)
NOPE! These are genuine links pointing back to a number of my websites. (no rel=”nofollow” in the anchor tag) AWESOME!
And here is the clincher…I literally created this Google Profile about 10 minutes and almost immediately after creating the account, I did a google search on myself:
Sweet! There it is!
But I want to conclude this with a few points:
1) This gives you some control over your personal identity on Google. Of course, names (like mine that is rare) works pretty effectively. But I also fear the creation of “mock” accounts trying to leverage off of other highly searched names. The idea is good, but can be abused.
2) From an SEO standpoint, this is one of the ONLY way I have ever been able to force any listing in the organic SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). I would not consider this a genuine “link”, though. Still it is there.
3) Because it is in the SERPs, my guess is that this an indexed page in Google (and it will probably have a bit of authority, too). Therefore, those anchor-text rich, followed links on your profile are more than likely to be spidered by the search engines (at least Google…).
A backlink, is a backlink, is a backlink and one on a Google page (that you can customize in less than 5 minutes) is a no-brainer for me.
Now this is not going to be replacing Facebook anytime soon, but it is another way of establishing your social AND SEO presence in the face of Google.
Big brother strikes again! (Is there going to be any anonymity left in this world?)
cheers…matt
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