DHReutter

If I had known that googling for Daniel Reutter would firstly come up (as by Feb 2nd, 2009) with a seven year old entry into an online signature list, complete with that stupid sentence I put there out of boredom - I would have chosen another sentence.

The second entry isn't this very blog either. I won't link to that one, because the site is essentially a spider. Even more interestingly the second entry doesn't contain much data about my person but about some other Daniel Reutter I am quite sure I am not related to. At least I hope so, because the mail address of this fellow links to a fan site of The Sims. And on top of this, the site offers my ICQ nick as a further contact.

Any unsuspecting person googling for me without any more information would either take me for a silly 22 year old or for someone who is into freedom of information (nothing wrong with that), quotes Garfield (I usually don't - at least not too often) and is into The Sims (I don't know the game, but I'd never be member of a fan site - with e-Mail address!).

Luckily, the third entry is this blog. This has changed recently and I am quite sure that one of the reasons was proper use of the Google Webmaster Tools. These tools offer a nice interface to help Google to tag and index your site and after I used it, the numbers of new Google Alerts with my site went up almost immediately. I now rank 3rd in a name search and even 1st with a search for my user name DHReutter, which I use almost everywhere (except for IRC).

Now I ponder about ways to get this first and second entry coming up with my name behind my blog. Perhaps I should use my full name more often, which is Daniel Reutter. When I put Daniel Reutter more often in my postings it could happen that the mention of Daniel Reutter gets a better page ranking than all those other Daniel Reutter entries.

Google is kind of a reference in the internet nowadays. Your personal Google Rank could become important when you try to audit for a job somewhere, because it seems to be common practice to type the name into Google to see what comes up. That's a problem, because the other Daniel Reutter has also a right to be listed with a good Rank (he doesn't do much in the internet, as it seems, except publishing pictures of his Sims). And there's no way to distinguish both of us just by glancing at those sites returned by the search engine.

So, in summary, I wouldn't care too much about Google Rankings. It's not important to be found by name, because of the hazzle to get to the top, the danger of being mistaken and so on. You probably wouldn't want to work for a firm whose HR people are too dumb to realize that by themselves, anyway. And while it may seem as a good substitute for comparing dick sizes, it isn't really much more than that. What's more important is to have people searching for what you want to offer to find you fast. For example, if you're interested in physical memory attacks via firewire, especially on your Mac, the corresponding Google search lists my 2ct to it on second place, aptly titled 'Escaping the FireWire DMA attack'. This is important, in my opinion.

But whatever floats your boats, buddies. Sincerely yours,
Daniel "Daniel Reutter's my name" Reutter