Note to egosurfers – stop being dumb
Ego-surfing is when you Google your name trying to see what people say about you, or how many times you show up. It’s lame.
But also it can be dumb.
I know there are sites out there calling me a fascist and an ass. That’s fine, cool. I have a massive ego and couldn’t care less. But what if I did care? What if I Googled my name, saw it in close proximity to the word ‘fascist’ and clicked on it?
There’s a long standing rumour that Google keeps track of SERP click-through rates and uses them to calculate a page’s position in search results. To my knowledge, Google hasn’t admitted to this for organic searches, but it certainly does admit to it for sponsored searches. It’s not a great leap to assume they do use it, as experience seems to be saying.
In English, when you click on a link in a Google search results page, you are telling Google that the link you clicked on is relevant for that search, and so it should appear higher in the search returns the next time you use that search string.
So if you Google your name, and see my blog and me calling you an idiot – don’t click on it you idiot. All you’re accomplishing is to exponentially increase the chance someone will read that post, and those nasty things about you.
There’s this one small town reporter that I did a post on. He commented on my site earlier this week after searching for it with a very particular search string (unique use of word case, and quotation marks etc…). When he searched the first time, my blog was on the 5th page of the search results. Since then, someone has used that identical search string 24 times. 24! The result? Search for his name today and you get my blog on the second page.
OK, so you’re curious, Google your name – but come on… Now you’re just embarrassing yourself.
