PPeogeo
The reference page

One page
everything else
gets checked against.

When Google is unsure about a fact, it wants somewhere authoritative to check. For a company that is usually the company's own site. For a person it is whatever page reads most like a definitive account of them.

That page has a name in this work: the entity home, which is simply the page treated as the source of truth about one person. Most people do not have one, and the ones who do usually have it by accident, on a platform they do not own.

WatchUsing the LinkedIn Featured section to triple profile views2:36

What belongs on it

  • Your full name, spelled exactly as you want it spelled everywhere else, forever
  • One sentence saying what you are, plainly enough that a stranger could repeat it
  • Current role and organisation, with the organisation named in full
  • Where you are based, at city level
  • What you have published, with permanent identifiers where they exist
  • Notable roles, appointments and recognitions, each one checkable elsewhere
  • Links out to every profile and page where you genuinely appear
  • The same master photograph used everywhere else
  • A date the page was last reviewed, so it visibly does not go stale

Why the accidental version is a problem

For a lot of professionals the most authoritative page about them is a profile on a social network or a bio on a former employer's site. Both work until they do not.

A platform profile is a page you rent. Its layout changes, its content is wrapped in someone else's branding, and a machine reading it cannot easily separate you from the platform. An employer bio disappears the day you leave.

Neither is wrong to have. Neither should be the most definitive thing about you.

What makes a page qualify

It states the plain facts about one person in ordinary sentences: who you are, what you do, where, since when, what you have published, where else you appear.

It sits on a domain you own, ideally at a stable address that never changes.

It links out to the other places you exist, and those places link back where they can. That mutual pointing is what lets a machine connect the scattered mentions into one person.

And it carries the same facts as everywhere else. A reference page that disagrees with your other profiles is worse than not having one, because it adds a vote to the confusion.

WatchPublishing eBooks on Google Books contributes to your Google Knowledge Panel4:24

What it is not

It is not a portfolio, a sales page or a personal brand statement. Those can live on the same site, on other pages.

The reference page is deliberately boring: an accurate account of a person, written so nothing has to be inferred. If it reads like marketing it is doing the wrong job.

It also is not a substitute for independent coverage. It is where the coverage gets reconciled. With nothing to reconcile, a perfect reference page achieves very little on its own, which is the most common disappointment in this work.

Questions

Does it have to be my own domain?

It should be. A page you own cannot be restructured, rebranded or deleted by somebody else, and it is the only version that stays yours between jobs.

Can my About page be it?

Often yes, if it is written as an account of you rather than as a pitch. Many About pages are pitches, which is why they do not work for this.

Do I need markup on it?

It helps, because it labels the facts rather than leaving them to be inferred. It is not a substitute for the facts being true elsewhere too.

Is one page really enough?

As the reference point, yes. As the whole strategy, no. Its job is to be the fixed thing everything else is compared against.

If you want this handled

Three thousand dollars flat, half at the start and half only when there is something live to show you. Six to twelve months is the honest window, and about a third of the people who ask are told not to proceed.