I can provide a counter example to this. Searching for my full name (and for many years my first name) has always resulted in my personal website being the top link.
It's not SEO, it's just age. I am an old man with an old school website that's happened to have been up for a long time.
> It's not SEO, it's just age. I am an old man with an old school website that's happened to have been up for a long time.
Disagree. My first personal web page from 1996 is still online and I have a very rare (perhaps unique) name. Until a few years ago, all my personal pages (including FB, Twitter) were ranked high by search engines, but since then they've been dethroned by references to former companies, press coverage, websites that list people affiliated with corporations and other such things.
My conclusion from this is that personal pages have somehow been ranked lower recently and news sites and popular websites will be ranked higher if they mention your name (even if the mention is not prominent and years old). This means that nowadays it would probably be useful to put a personal homepage on a popular site like about.me.
I have a ten year old personal website that does not appear to be indexed by google at all anymore. There was an article about this that made the front page, that some old websites are being dropped from the index. If you search my name from duck duck go its the first hit.
Your website is indexed by Google. You can see whether it's indexed by running a site specific search. Put "site:" before the domain name. But that site has three pages, one of which is a blog listing with no content. It's not ranked because there's nothing worth ranking.
If you are searching for information about me, it is the best source online. Ideally the best sources are listed first. DDG does that, and Google doesn't list it even in the first half-dozen pages. Is it really a worse website than all the spam white-page sites?
For the longest time searching for "Steve", in the UK, brought my website as the first result.
These days with "personalised" search results it is harder to tell, but my own searches for my full-name bring me first. Even though I share that name with a few other people.
(I wish I'd bought steve.com, there was a time when I was tempted but after a year or two it was too late. I ended up having https://steve.org.uk, then later https://steve.fi after I moved to Finland.)
Me too. I have a simple static site/blog with mostly textual content going back to around 1999 and I'm lucky to have a reasonably unique firstname/lastname combo (ish); my blog currently is top on Google and Bing.
It's not SEO, it's just age. I am an old man with an old school website that's happened to have been up for a long time.