Identity as Infrastructure

Most portfolio SEO advice focuses on what your site says. This post is about who your site says you are.

There's a distinction worth making early. Content signals like keywords, meta descriptions and heading structure tell crawlers what a page is about. Identity signals tell them whether the person behind it is real, consistent, and findable across the web. Both matter, but developers tend to over-invest in the first and ignore the second entirely.

The Knowledge Graph Problem

Google doesn't just index pages. It builds entities: coherent representations of people, organisations, and concepts that persist across searches and surfaces. When someone searches your name, Google isn't just returning pages that contain it. It's assembling a picture from everything it can verify about you across the web.

The problem for most developers is that their web presence is scattered. A GitHub profile here, a LinkedIn there, maybe a Mastodon account, an old Stack Overflow profile. Google can see all of these, but without connective tissue it can't confidently say they belong to the same person.

sameAs: Giving Google the Connective Tissue

The fix is a single Schema.org property: sameAs. Declared in your website's JSON-LD, it tells Google explicitly which profiles across the web belong to the same identity:

{
  "@type": "Person",
  "name": "Your Name",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://github.com/yourhandle",
    "https://social.linux.pizza/@yourhandle"
  ]
}

This is the foundation of E-E-A-T for an individual developer. It's not the projects you've shipped or the posts you've written but the verifiable web of presence that lets Google treat you as a coherent entity rather than a name that appears on several unrelated pages.

The effect compounds over time. As Google's confidence in your identity grows, content you publish anywhere in that network carries more weight. A GitHub repository, a write-up, a comment on a technical forum; all of it starts to cohere around a single, credible signal.

Trust Signals That Support the Foundation

Identity markup works best on a site that doesn't undermine it. An expired certificate, missing privacy policy and sloppy referrer handling are quiet signals that erode the credibility the schema is trying to establish. They're not SEO tactics, they're basic hygiene that keeps the foundation solid.

Once they're in place, the identity layer has somewhere to stand. And that's where the more interesting technical work begins.