Images and Personal Branding On The Radio
While driving to the train, I normally switch between a bunch of crappy radio station music (it’s my guilty pleasure, don’t judge!) and Eric and Kathy in the morning. I actually find them pretty hilarious. Well, they have a segment called “Sharp Attack” with Patrick Sharp from the Chicago Blackhawks. On the segment, they basically ask him all sorts of questions, about anything really: Other players, personal family life, and random question that fans send to him.
One such question caught my attention when they asked him if him “inquiring minds want to know if other players take boxing lessons to help them out in fights”.
A fun question to a hockey player. Although not necessarily relevant to him, he did say that Brandon Bollig takes MMA classes. He also said if you Google his name, a lot of weird pictures pop up and one is “a picture of him in his MMA underwear getting ready to fight someone”.
I think mine and Kathy’s reactions were identical: “I have to go check that out” (albeit for different reasons). You see, on the heals of a changes in Google Image Search, I am always interested to see what shows up in different equity within a search result, and if it could potentially be devastating to someone. It always opens up the big question of “do you know what comes up for your name”?
The good news for Brandon is, this is the only image remotely similar that I could find, and it seems pretty harmless.
It made me realize that I might have some work to do for myself to get my images showing in Image search. Because I am apparently getting rocked.
I have a bit more work to do. But at least when you Google “Aaron Friedman” this blog shows up in the top 4 results.
Messed Up Wikipedia
While we are talking about Brandon Bollig, there was one other strange oddity I came across that I thought some SEO’s might find interesting.
There is something wrong with his Wikipedia page. The Box on the right is missing and the parameters showing it is all that is left in the main bio.
I need to think this through a bit more, but it seems to me that this error might give some insight into what Google actually pulls into the info panels on the right.
Given, there are some missing components, so Google is being somewhat selective here (would love to research some more on this), but I think as we are talking about valuable real estate in the engine, this would be another area more thank anything to make sure you are populating and editing with the information you want.
Moral of the Story
I think it goes without saying that no matter who you are, no one is immune to Google results. Optimizing your personal brand, and making sure what you actually want to be found is being found is an exercise that everyone should be going through. Especially as even the walled garden of Facebook becomes more “searchable”, bottom line is, keep an eye on your results.