Why is my twitter account on the first page of self-Google-search?
November 22, 2016 9:55 AM Subscribe
I have an anonymous twitter account I use for ranting about politics and bad jokes about basketball. It's not particularly offensive, but not very professional. I'm job hunting, so I just googled my first + last name for the first time in a while and it came up in the first page of results.
1. Why did this happen?
2. Can I make it stop? (Outside of just locking my account, which is a pain)
1. The email for the account is a gmail account but that account isn't my first/last name and the Google+ account attached to it doesn't have my last name on it.
2. I never share location on my twitter account and have discoverability turned off.
3. I do sometimes post from Instagram to twitter and FB simultaneously.
4. There might be a page or article or two out there with my name on it linking my twitter. But not on a google property.
Halp.
1. The email for the account is a gmail account but that account isn't my first/last name and the Google+ account attached to it doesn't have my last name on it.
2. I never share location on my twitter account and have discoverability turned off.
3. I do sometimes post from Instagram to twitter and FB simultaneously.
4. There might be a page or article or two out there with my name on it linking my twitter. But not on a google property.
Halp.
You almost certainly wrote your own answer: "There might be a page or article or two out there with my name on it linking my twitter."
posted by sageleaf at 10:05 AM on November 22, 2016
posted by sageleaf at 10:05 AM on November 22, 2016
Best answer: Yeah, the answer is always "links".
I'm walking the line between internet detective and internet creep here, but it looks like you might have an about.me page that links to a twitter account. If that's you, then your website linked from your MeFi profile points to a different Twitter account. Presumably one of those isn't the one you want advertised, so you'd want to change/remove that link. If you want specific details I can MeFi Mail them to you.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:07 AM on November 22, 2016 [2 favorites]
I'm walking the line between internet detective and internet creep here, but it looks like you might have an about.me page that links to a twitter account. If that's you, then your website linked from your MeFi profile points to a different Twitter account. Presumably one of those isn't the one you want advertised, so you'd want to change/remove that link. If you want specific details I can MeFi Mail them to you.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:07 AM on November 22, 2016 [2 favorites]
Best answer: Sageleaf (as well as you) are right. Twitter has a heavier "weight" in SEO (search engine optimization) and since you linked to your now non-anonymous twitter page, Google has crawled your page and sees that your name is associated with a "heavy" link and has pulled you into its orbit.
posted by a2z at 10:10 AM on November 22, 2016
posted by a2z at 10:10 AM on November 22, 2016
Response by poster: Memails with me-specific details welcome! So google sees that about me page, logs that I link to my Twitter on there, and adds the account to my name? That seems weird. So if I delete the aboutme page it will get less high in results?
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:13 AM on November 22, 2016
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:13 AM on November 22, 2016
Best answer: This happened to me, it's the worst! (Especially if you don't control the page linking to your site). Deleting the Twitter link from about.me might help, but changes usually do not happen quickly.
Twitter has some tips for your situation, including how to request that a Twitter account be removed from Google search results:
https://support.twitter.com/articles/15349
If you don't want to make tweets private, you could throw people off by changing the name on your twitter account to something realistic that's not your name, removing the location, and making sure there are no photos of you.
posted by beyond_pink at 10:18 AM on November 22, 2016 [1 favorite]
Twitter has some tips for your situation, including how to request that a Twitter account be removed from Google search results:
https://support.twitter.com/articles/15349
If you don't want to make tweets private, you could throw people off by changing the name on your twitter account to something realistic that's not your name, removing the location, and making sure there are no photos of you.
posted by beyond_pink at 10:18 AM on November 22, 2016 [1 favorite]
Sharing from Instagram to Facebook and Twitter creates a link back to your Instagram in both cases. And Instagram is now owned by Facebook (afaik?) who are notoriously not great with privacy. I don't know if that actually affects your Google results, but at a guess, it sounds like not a good practice.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 12:27 PM on November 22, 2016
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 12:27 PM on November 22, 2016
This thread is closed to new comments.
Your search results might look different while you're logged in to google.
posted by jozxyqk at 10:01 AM on November 22, 2016 [1 favorite]