You’re listening to jesse.blog. For over a decade, I, Jesse Friedman, have struggled with the perception of my identity. While this is not a valid identity crisis, I know who I am. It has been challenging to manage the reactions of followers who Google me. My efforts to shine as an expert have been overshadowed by the depravity of the evil contributions of another Jesse Friedman.

At the turn of the century, there was a brief window of time when I owned the Google SERPs search engine result pages for the term Jesse Friedman. It was a point of pride as I was cutting my teeth on keyword analysis and backlinks, trying to grow as a search engine optimization expert. The proof of my expertise existed in pixels and bytes on your screen, confirmed by the world’s most powerful search engine.

That was up until about 13 years ago, in 2013 Google pushed an alert to my phone, igniting a series of buzzes and chimes, quickly redirecting my attention. There it was, the most confusing and offensive message I’ve ever received. Jesse Friedman is 100% guilty of sexually abusing children. The Daily News. I can still feel the tightness in my chest as I started navigating through the alert.

My mind was racing through the possible explanations of what was happening here, a case of mistaken identity, a prank, a well thought out phishing scheme. Instead, it turns out the article was 100% accurate. In 1987 when I was about four years old, that Jesse Friedman conspired with his father, Arnold Friedman, to collect and distribute child pornography and molest the children taking Arnold’s computer class.

I grew up and went to college and established myself as a qualified and respected expert, speaker, and author without ever identifying as homonymous evil. The publishing of the Daily News article marked the end of my reign as the dominant Jesse Friedman on Google. That Jesse Friedman had lost an appeal, and the media pounced on the opportunity to relive the events leading up to Capturing the Friedmans, which is the name of a documentary that recounted the entire affair.

The Wikipedia and IMDB pages for the documentary now ranked fourth and 10th, respectively. I would never again rank well on Google today. The closest I come is a spot on the bottom of the third page, which links to my Amazon author profile. I did fight it for a time, utilizing my skills as an internet marketer and SEO, but alas, I gave up the good fight competing against a polarizing and popular criminal story, complete with Wikipedia pages, documentaries, and sites dedicated to his innocence, would have consumed my professional life.

The lore of the Jesse Friedman juxtaposition became quite popular among my colleagues when Jesse Friedman was Googled during a presentation to a group of executives that was an attempt to introduce me as I was not in attendance. As a result, I am now referred to as the other Jesse Friedman, and not that Jesse Friedman. In the future, if you’re looking to Google me, I suggest you amend your search to include the clarifying term WordPress, at least while the query still reflects the right Jesse Friedman.

My name is Jesse Friedman, and thank you for listening to this week’s blog. If you found it motivating, inspiring, or just plain liked it, consider subscribing to my channel or signing up for my newsletter for more posts like these. I’ll see you on Monday for the next one.