When I was a kid, I used to think that I was the only Matt Dolphin in the world. https://forebears.io/surnames/dolphin indicates that Dolphin is the 72,416th most common surname in the world. (not very common). It also claims there are approximately 6879 people with the lastname of Dolphin in the world. It always seemed pretty unlikely that there would be many (any?) people with the name Matthew Dolphin.
Matt Dolphin’s Doppelgänger
My mind was blown in college when I was visiting Northwestern University and was introduced to another Matt Dolphin! How could this be? By the way, if you’re reading this, Matt, contact me and I’ll add you to the complete list of Matthew Dolphins. 😉
It’s possible that I was the first Matthew Dolphin on the Internet. I purchased the domain names MattDolphin.com and MatthewDolphin.com back in 2003. But I hadn’t done much with either of them. Even though they contained very little content, they were exact match domains. That worked to place me at the top of the Search Engine Result Page (SERPS) for “Matt Dolphin” and “Matthew Dolphin” for many years.
Even More Matthew Dolphins?
But as the internet and social networks grew I noticed that new Matthew (‘Matt’) Dolphins kept popping up. My doppelgängers were claiming social media accounts with MY name. Their web pages and photos were starting to compete with mine. On top of that, Miami Dolphins football players with the name Matt or random dudes named Matt swimming with dolphins also started to appear in Google’s first page of results. Then came Google’s algorithm updates and my websites were pushed down to the 3rd or 4th page of results. First world problems, right? Frankly, it wasn’t a big deal because it didn’t really impact my day to day life at the time.
Rise of the Real Matt Dolphin
Finally, toward the end of 2018 I realized my lack of visibility on Google was going to be a problem moving forward. I wanted to grow my consulting and coaching business. And this being the 21st century, people might search for me online before deciding to hire me.
So I decided to make dominating Google’s search results for Matt Dolphin and Matthew Dolphin a priority. That would mean redesigning my websites and starting to post regular content. Posting about my work, life, hobbies, etc. would help. But I theorized that there was another approach that might boost the real Matt Dolphin above all others:
- What if I wrote a few posts about other people named Matthew Dolphin?
- What if I documented my efforts to improve my ranking for the search term Matt Dolphin?
- What if I shared some interesting things I found along the way about Dolphins or famous people named Matthew?
To paraphrase another famous Matt, Matt Damon, I’m going to Search Engine Optimize the shit out of this! And hopefully I’ll have a bit of fun along the way. This post and others like it are my blatant attempt at personal SEO so that I can again claim the top spots online for Matt Dolphin. I know… everyone needs a hobby, right?
If you’re name happens to be Matthew Dolphin, let me know. I’d love to connect!