Searching your own name
Try it. Whatever comes back is what people see before they meet you.
For most working people the first page of results was written by somebody else, years ago, for a different purpose.
What usually comes back
Search engines assemble a person from whatever they can find. A network profile, because those rank well. A company page from an employer you may have left. Conference listings, old press, a directory entry somebody else created. Increasingly there is also a summary written by software that read all of it and compressed it into a paragraph.
None of that was written to describe you. It is a pile of fragments, ordered by whichever happens to carry the most weight, and the oldest pieces often sit highest because they have been linked to for longest.
The common complaints
People notice the same handful of things when they look.
It is years out of date
A title you held in 2019, or a company you left. Old pages keep ranking long after they stop being true.
It is somebody else
Common names share results. Being mixed up with a stranger is harder to fix than being described badly.
It is thin
A name, a job title, nothing else. Readers fill that gap with assumptions, and rarely generous ones.
It is scattered
Pieces of a career across six sites, each incomplete, none of them agreeing on the dates.
What can actually be changed
Very little of this can be deleted. Other people's pages belong to them, and asking a search engine to forget something is slow and rarely works outside narrow legal grounds.
Adding is more realistic than removing. A page you control, kept current and written to be read, gives search engines something accurate to show and gives a reader somewhere to land that settles the question. It does not push anything down by force, and nobody can promise you a position in anyone's results. What it does is make sure there is a version of the facts that came from you.
Questions
Can I get old results removed?
Sometimes, and usually not quickly. Removal depends on who owns the page and which laws apply where you live. It is worth asking the site owner directly before anything else.
Will a profile page rank for my name?
Search engines read a stable address and the structured data underneath it, both of which the page gives them. Whether that earns you a position is their decision, and anyone who guarantees one is selling you something they cannot deliver.
What if someone shares my name?
Specifics are what separate you: employers, places, dates, the field you work in. A page dense with checkable detail is easier for both readers and software to tell apart from a namesake.
How long does it take to show up?
That is up to the search engines, not us. A new page has to be found and indexed first, and how long that takes varies.
Does this involve deleting anything?
No. The aim is to publish an accurate account. Nothing gets suppressed.
Put something accurate out there
One page, written with you, at an address that stays put.