What do a feminist author and a soap opera star have in common?

You can do a lot of free association when you’re on cold meds. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about something related to advertising. That got me thinking about a book I once read for a class by a feminist author who premised, in part, that women’s choices were unduly influenced by Hollywood and Madison Avenue. So women who “nested” were doing so because they watched 30 Something, and if we wore sexy lingerie it was because we’d seen a Christian Lacroix or Calvin Klein ad. Yeah, right. I eventually threw the book across the room and never got to the end.

Apropos of that conversation the other day, I wondered: whatever happened to Susan Faludi? So I did a Google search. But I spelled her name wrong and Google asked: Do you mean Susan Lucci? I still got that when I added in the book title. Eventually I went to Amazon, plugged in the book title, and figured it out.

I know very little about search engine optimization, which is why I try to learn from Lee Odden, Matt McGee, and other SEO pros. But I know that if your name can be mistaken for any variation of a soap opera star, you’ve got work to do on your online rankings. (Meanwhile, the irony that a feminist who posited a backlash against women was mistaken for a soap opera star wasn’t lost on me.)

How’s your online ranking? Have you ever been mistaken online for someone else? If so, what did you do to correct your online profile?

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