Life Hacking: Google Images Loves Me
At least it will after it indexes this post.
Goal: Have at least 10 images of me indexed within the first 2 pages (I now realize this depends on your screen resolution) of Google Images when you Google Image search “Chris Durham”. (At the start of this challenge I already have 1)
Why: A good friend of mine, Peter Lang , shared an article with me about a girl who got revenge on her ex by posting pictures of him to a website where funny and crude comments were put on the image. When you searched for him the entire first 2 pages of results where the same picture of him with insulting text. This gave me an idea, how cool would it be to have a majority of the images returned from Google actually be of me and not of the million other Chris Durham’s out there. When you type in a celebrity name you only see results of that person. It’s time to become a Google images celebrity.
Research and Analysis: When this idea occurred to me I searched for myself and found that I did in fact pop up in the results, it was just at the bottom of page 2. So I tried to figure out why the pictures above mine where above and why mine was below, here is what I figured out. The first 2 results are located on on pages with a higher ranking than mine. The other images had an equal ranking but where titled as ChrisDurham.jpg or the text Chris Durham was located very close to the image. So, since I have access to the site where my image was located, my work website, I logged in and got to modifying. The first change I made was renaming the file from 1235.jpg to Chris_Durham.jpg. This change alone, once Google reindexed, moved my image to page 1! After this result I changed “Chris” which was near my image, to “Chris Durham”. (At the time of this writing I am still waiting for Google to notice the change.)
Now these changes may not have as big of an impact for you depending on what kind of results pop up when you search your name. If your name is Justin Bieber good luck getting your images to appear on page 1.
Game Plan: Originally I was thinking about how to get my images on to higher ranked sites but it looks like only the first 2 images for “Chris Durham” have higher Page Ranks than this page right here so… I plan to put a few images of myself into this post, each titled Chris_Durham_”descriptive text”.jpg and make sure that in the descriptive text right under the image I include my full name. I will also add an additional picture to my Chris Durham work page bio and any other page on a site I have access to. I will then submit those page’s url to be indexed by Google, something that would happen on it’s own eventually but I’d like to speed up the process. Then, I wait and see.
Have you tried to impact your name searches? Share your efforts in the comments below.
Chris Durham Studying Abroad in France in 2007
Chris Durham on a rainy street in front of the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, France 2007
Chris Durham: In 2007 I studied abroad in Paris, France with my friend Peter Lang. We attended the Leonardo da Vinci University, located near the ‘La Grande Arche’ station, in the La Defense District.
Chris Durham with friends from Egypt and Ecuador 2009
Chris Durham with Fulbright Scholars from Egypt and Ecuador
Chris Durham: Friends visiting Fresno from Pepperdine University.