Manage your online identity.

Couldn’t help but notice this article on Digg this evening. One of our beta testers wrote a nice review of our service, which I’ll excerpt here.

ClaimID popped back onto my sonar after I was doing some searches manually. I am currently in the job market, and it would be foolish not to check what Google and other search engines think about me. On my search results, my ClaimID page was ranked very highly, which surprised me since I hadn’t added any links. Immediately, I began to use the service, to make full use of the highly ranked result.

It is obvious the ClaimID guys are doing some good SEO on the site, and that other people are starting to link into it, giving it some good PageRank juice. Google has changed their algorithm recently to rank higher those pages which contain your search result in the URL. In this case, my ClaimID contained parts of my name, and this combined with ClaimID’s PR of 5, boosted it right up.

I was able to put together a decent summary of my web presence in about 10 minutes using the handy bookmarklet and a couple of categories. In the future, I will probably put this URL on my resume so that employers can go directly there, and I will worry a little less about what strange things they might attribute or misattribute to me. ClaimID also conveniently caches the links that you find, so if something is moved or deleted, you have a record of what you’ve done or people have said about you.

I like this review for a number of reasons. Even though Matt didn’t really take advantage of the service after signing up (hey, there are a LOT of betas these days), ClaimID immediately went to work for Matt. When he decided he wanted to start taking advantage of ClaimID, it was there for him. Now that he’s filled out his ClaimID, he can present a more complete picture of his online identity, and get all the benefits of the useful things we’ve built into the service.

If you’ve signed up for claimID, have you Googled yourself lately? Brian Benzinger found some interesting results, and I found Emily Chang’s claimID page at position 32 (Update: 23 and dropping) in her Google results (and she only posted it a few days back). You might be surprised with what you find. In the meantime, check out Matt’s review of ClaimID, and if you’re so inclined, digg it here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 5:38 am and is filed under claimID.