Owning your own personal brand is harder than you might think.

It’s neck-and-neck for the domination of the “Adam Nash” top 10 search results on Google.  It used to be just a two-way battle between me, and some child born in Colorado for the express purpose of donating stem cells to his sibling.  Now, there are a three contenders, and it’s getting tight.

Right now, the score is:

• Yours truly, with links 1, 2, 5, and 6.
• Adam Nash (aka Adam Ramona) from Melbourne, Australia has links 3 & 4 & 7  He’s using Blogspot and Ning for pagerank.  Has his own domain, YamanakaNash.net.
• Adam Nash, the baby born from Lisa & Jack Nash in Colorado, rounds out the bottom 10 with 8, 9, 10.  Old news links.

Part of this is my fault.  I left adamnash.blogspot.com open, and Adam Ramona took it.  I’m usually quite good about locking up the name space.  He also took nashadam at Ning, but he couldn’t get adamnash because I had that locked up.

In any case, I’m lucky right now because I have the holy trinity of personal page rank working for me:

• A personal blog that links to my LinkedIn profile and my personal domain
• A personal domain that links to my LinkedIn profile and my blog
• A LinkedIn profile that links to my personal domain and my blog

Plus, for whatever reason, Stanford continues to have amazing page rank for my old Computer Science department page which has been pointing to adamnash.com for the last 10 years.

Still, I’m worried I’m going to lose the top spot if the pace of news coverage on my doppelganger in Australia is any indication.  One thing he’s doing, which is smart, is creating a web page that indexes every article about him, tied to his domain.  Maybe I should do the same thing with the heavy news coverage of LinkedIn product launches with my name in it.

Hmmmm.