Marshall Kirkpatrick, Technology Journalist » Add One Line To Your Blog or Twitter Could Become Your Primary Identity

Add One Line To Your Blog or Twitter Could Become Your Primary Identity

64 Comments 03.30.09

OpenID community leader Scott Kveton noticed this morning that his Twitter profile page is now the #1 search result in Google for his last name, not his blog. This is something TechCrunch reported on earlier this month, but people are just starting to wrap their heads around it. I know I want this blog to remain the #1 search result for my name, not my Twitter profile.

In a conversation on FriendFeed, Ben Hedrington pointed out that in addition to the page title change that TechCrunch reported on – Twitter also uses the rel=”me” markup and Kveton’s blog does not. I looked and realized that my blog here doesn’t either!

So the long and short of this story is that if you want to make sure that Google understands your blog to be your primary beacon on the web, then you should add the words rel=”me” to a relevant link on your blog. I’ve added that tag to the link on my sidebar that goes to my feedback page, because that’s a good page for me. It’s as simple as making the link text read a href=”http://marshallk.com/feedback” rel=”me”.

That may not solve the entire problem but it should help and it’s good form. Machine readable microformats like rel=”me” are likely to be an increasingly important part of the web in the future. Would readers here suggest otherwise? If I’m reading too much into this, let me know.

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Thanks for pointing this out – very interesting.

Glad to see that microformats are starting to earn their keep!

To expand on your idea, I would highly recommend that you pick ONE URL (i.e. your homepage — in your case marshallk.com) and use that all over the web, since some places, like Flickr, also support the rel-me identity consolidation convention from XFN and the more rel-me that you have pointing back (and point out!) to the SAME URL, the more likely web spiders will treat that as your so-called canonical ID.

I’ve written about this a bit more previously:

http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2008/03/11/portable-contact-lists-and-the-case-against-xfn/

http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/01/29/scoping-xfn-and-identifying-definitive-hcards/

I had never realized that until just now. I think very few people have wrapped their heads around microformats yet, but we need to be on top of it if we want a jump on our competitors.

There’s only so much Google Juice to go around, and I want a big glass.

Interesting, at the moment, my LinkedIn profile ranks higher than my blog. I’ll try this out to check if there is any impact.

Funny, my LinkedIn profile has also jumped to my first hit, over my blog. Thanks for the heads-up on this, going to fix this little gotcha right now… =)

Any thoughts on what happens in the case of conflicts? Twitter, LinkedIn and you personal site using the rel=”me”?

great to see Microformats taking weight!

thanks for the post!

Regards,
Sean
http://twitter.com/SeanNieuwoudt

Any idea how to do this with a hosted WP blog? I can only (so far as I know) edit the permalink, not the full “a hreft.” Am I wrong?

Thanks for the advice. Needed!

Yaa, my Facebook profile is the number one on hits. At least I beat out the other guys with the same name.

Very interesting. I just Googled myself and my twitter profile ranks first, above my LinkedIn profile. I will have to make some changes.

Great info. I wonder how long it is before we end up with a “Google Webmaster” tool for our own identities to clearly link to our “main” profile.

For a WP blog, you can add a link w/ the normal link manager and link it to whichever page on your site.

When adding the link, croll down to REL selection and click the ‘another web address of mine’ and that will put the ‘me’ factor in there…

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I also noticed that Twitter is putting a “nofollow” on people’s web link. Shouldn’t we be able to pass the authority of our Twitter profile to our own blog / website?

@markdilley: You can have as many rel-me links as you want. It’s about creating an identity graph. Check the source of factoryjoe.com to see how I do it.

@Vinicius: Check out this support post on that topic:

http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/good_netiquette_microformats_get_rid_of_the_rel_me_no_follow

hrmm… maybe google shouldn’t link to https://api.twitter.com/... since the ssl certificate isn’t valid.

valuable advice as always, thanks Marshall. i decided to add rel=me to all the internal website links pointing to my profile page

Whats this about, I am new to all this and never heard of rel=”me”

I have to wonder what will happen when someone’s blog, with far less pagerank than Twitter advertises the rel=me tag.

I’d think that Google would choose the page with better page rank (Twitter’s) instead of an individual’s blog that has lower pagerank.

Disclosure: I work for Twitter, and no, we don’t want to steal your traffic.

I have to wonder what will happen when someone’s blog, with far less pagerank than Twitter advertises the rel=me tag.

I’d think that Google would choose the page with better page rank (Twitter’s) instead of an individual’s blog that has lower pagerank.

Disclosure: I work for Twitter, and no, we don’t want to steal your traffic.

Interesting.. Even I have the same thing happening for me.. Didnt know there was a solution for this..

I wish you all would speak English so I could understand what you mean.

You might also want to consider creating a Google Profile (like this http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/114467006948275265842#about) as Google’s profiles tool indexes XFN relationships. I don’t think these are pulled into wider search results just yet, but hopefully we’ll see this someday.

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[...] Twitter recently changed its title tag on user bio pages to include the rel=”me” attribute on links. That is pushing some people’s bios up to No. 1 on Google and has some marketers concerned. But there is a fix for that. [...]

This is what happens when sites implement nofollow.

Comments everywhere are nofollow, which is why I was such as strong advocate of the dofollow movement – it really makes a difference.
All the wonderful javascript based comment services don’t help much.
Nofollow on tons of other services, and the tech bloggers pretty much ignored the cries from the SEO community when Twitter started nofollowing links.

rel=”me” for SEO? – I am microformats savvy compared to many other SEOs – I don’t know anyone who has tested it, and there are so many links out there that you can get in reverse, back to your blog, that doing something on your blog is insignificant.

What might make a significant difference?

My nofollow those dupes plugin will help direct juice internally, why still giving credit on permalink pages.

Nofollow blogrolls on all but the home page.

Ensure that the first home link in the source code, site-wide, is a text link with your primary keyword (which you can style with a header graphic if you really want)

Nofollow links to Twitter from all but your home page.

Scotts twitter profile has 2000 links going to it, all reasonably well optimized images.
His blog only has 7000 links going to it, which I assume are not well optimized.

It is obvious what is going to happen for a search for just Kveton

A little linkbuilding with your name is not hard, as Twitter profiles don’t get that much juice from others, though if you add your twitter profile to every place you add your blog, it will be an uphill battle.

I need to do something to fix my SERPs, there are 2 listings in the top50 from the US for Andy Beard which are not specifically about me.

AWESOME post. Something to jump right into testing…

Does make me wonder how much weight is being distributed from the wordpress blogs that designate the appropriate link relationship. If I linked multiple blogrolls to your blog as my colleague and you never changed your rel-me, does my linking to your blog instead of wordpress compensate for your lack of rel-me?

Testing will be fun…

Thanks for the post! (and the new testing we’ll have to do…grumble, grumble

Sounds like a tipping point for microformats!

Suddenly people have a practical reason to understand and implement them.

Microformats Entering “Real Life” w/rel=”me”

Marshall Kirkpatrick gets a discussion going regarding the implications of Google using the microformat markup rel=”me” to identify which site is most appropriate for a person’s name/indentity. Microformats are going to be a bigger thing as we head …

valuable advice as always, thanks Marshall. i decided to add rel=me to all the internal website links pointing to my profile page.

Good advice…. Let me know if you need any assistance with this.

Mankato Web Site Design

Your advice is valuable.

thank you for you advise,it’s very helpfull.

Regard from the island of Bali

I’ve been fighting this battle with facebook
We’ll see results soon

“Machine readable microformats like rel=”me” …”
We must exercise caution indeed- so we do not… rel=”no follow” rel=”me”…LOL
Thanks for the insight into rel=”me”!

yes, twitter is becoming a contact signature, and most the websites updates are being tracked by twitter

twitter updated are being tracked easily than finding updates on the webpage, so i think twitter is another door to enter in a site

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Another alternative is to delete your Twitter account, and later use Google Webmaster tools to remove links that do not exist. It worked for my website, http://vam.si, but I believe it is only temporary.

I am entirely sure if this is possible, but is there a way one can restrict external links to your own website. Maybethrough .htacess?

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Yikes! That’s for the heads up on this Marshall. I’m making the changes.

Cheers!

Twiter the hell =)

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has anyone had any luck placing rel=”me” links on Facebook profiles or pages?

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I am the lead writer at ReadWriteWeb.com, one of the most widely read technology blogs online and syndicated daily by the New York Times.

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