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It is sort of embarrassing to admit, but for whatever reasons Google may have, they were ranking my LinkedIn.com profile #1 in google for a “Collin LaHay” search. For those of you who don’t know yet, Collin LaHay is my name.

It seemed odd that I had received a pagerank 5 and having an extreme amount of trust on my domain, that Google wouldn’t think I should rank the top result for my own name. It just goes to show that you should register your name, as well as your companies, and possibly even your competitors as users on many of the web2.0 websites because they are growing so fast and the search engines give them so much authority.

My LinkedIn profile had only 41 backlinks to it, while my blog has over 10,000, yet Google still considered it to be the most trustful result for my search.

Since it was my account, I was not too worried about it, but the thought that worried me was what if someone else registered the LinkedIn name “Collin LaHay” and was using the profile to make me look bad? Since LinkedIn.com doesn’t know who you are, you could potentially register some honest persons name and have a bunch of racist URL’s as your homepage, and Google would think that since the page was on LinkedIn.com, it should rank really high. Can you imagine what kind of annoyance this would be?

Well, thankfully my blog now ranks #1 for my name, but the lesson that YOU ALL should take out of this is to register your name on any big social media website that you can think of, even if you are not planning on using the website. You will thank me 6 months down the road before a competitor grabs your name and tries to blackmail you or make you look bad… A 30 minute fix now can save your reputation (or that of the businesses you are affiliated with) down the road.

Has anyone had any bad experiences like this one? It would be a very lame thing to do, but I know there are people out there who have tried it.