My name looked worse on Google than strangers did
I searched my own name, looked at the result, and thought: why does mine look worse than the pages other people wrote about me? So I dug in.
Half the answer was boring and completely out of my hands. The title of my result showed up purple, which looked cheap to me, but that’s just my own browser marking a site I visit a lot. Every other searcher sees it in normal blue. Nothing to fix there.
The real problems were two. Google was printing my bare domain where my name should go, and it was scraping some blurb out of my footer instead of the description I’d actually written. Both trace back to one gap: my site had the basic sharing tags but no structured data at all. So Google was guessing who I am instead of being told.
The fix was to stop hoping and start stating. I added a small block of structured data (a Person and a WebSite entry) that says, in a format Google trusts, this is Aayush, here’s the one-line bio. Then I rewrote the homepage description to lead with my name and what I do, so it answers “who is this person” instead of describing the page.
Two things worth passing on. A meta description is a suggestion, not a command. Google will rewrite it whenever your page text answers the search better, and for a name search it wants a bio. You improve your odds by writing the better answer. You never get to force it.
And the official tool lied to me, in the reassuring direction. Google’s Rich Results Test said “no items detected,” which looked like my markup had flopped. It hadn’t. That tool only reports the fancy result types and ignores Person and WebSite on purpose. A different validator confirmed mine was live and clean.
Same thread as launch day back on the 11th: the plumbing behind a search result is mostly invisible, and mostly the whole game. If you’ve got a personal site, add a Person block. It’s the one spot where you get to state the facts about yourself instead of hoping Google infers them.