So, I have been out of work for over a year. I have had plenty of great interviews where I felt like I basically have the job. But, what usually happens is I hear nothing back and I don’t know why. Part of the reason might be the layoffs that have been happening all over the tech industry. There is definitely more competition for all the jobs that I try to get and admittedly I don’t have the most impressive resume. However, there is another reason that I suspect. When you google my name, there is a X (Twitter) account that I have absolutely nothing to do with that comes up second in the search results:

Google Twitter

This account is pretty bizarre. There is pictures of weed and tweets about being lonely and having no one to talk to. This account hasn’t been active in over 10 years and the name is spelled differently so I don’t know why the magical google algorithms felt the need to priortize this result. I can’t prove it but I wouldn’t be surprised if a potentional employer googled my name, saw this twitter account and said, “Nope.”

The first thing I did was buy ads to promote my actual website here on rawbytes.dev. I thought maybe the clicks would get my site up on the page rankings. I know Google claims that you can’t just buy your way up the rankings but I didn’t believe them. After one month and $40 dollars paid to Google, I realized that this wasn’t working.

Next thing I tried, was using Google’s “Remove result” feature. This is a very recent addition that allows a person to delist doxxing and other criminal stuff from google’s search results.

Google2

The options were super confusing and I couldn’t find the right one for “This crappy site is irrelevant to the search term and might be hurting my job prospects.” I gave it shot anyway and was unsuccessful.

E-Mail

So where am I at now? I did some research and I saw that google has some tools in the developer section to try and get your site on google. (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/get-on-google) I tested the “site:” query test that the document recommended and my page didn’t show up so it looks like google hasn’t found and indexed my website yet. I also saw in the documentation that you can manually request for google to crawl your site. (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/ask-google-to-recrawl) So I requested a manual crawl of my site and I have to wait 24 hours to see if Google can find it. Also, I went ahead and created an account on X (Twitter) with my real name just to see if I can get it higher ranked on Google when people search my name.

I think the most frustrating part of this whole thing is the fact that I feel like I have to have some form of social media besides Linkedin to combat the SEO poisoning. I have been avoiding social media for my mental health and I have been working really hard to remove my info from data brokers and have less data about me out on the internet. I don’t really want to be on X but I’m not sure what else I can do at this point. I really wish Google would show my Github, my HacktheBox profile, my TryHackMe profile, because what I really want people to see when they Google my name is a IT Security professional who wants to transition from blue team to red team. Anyway, I’m going to keep hacking away at this until I figure it out and if any potentional employer happens to come across this post, just know that that stupid “isisrawlins” twitter account is not me.