Does a Google Scholar page help SEO?

• ~200 words • 0.9 minute read

As a result of circumstances that are murky to me, a paper I wrote as a freshman in college at Portland State University about Leon Termen, inventor of the Theremin, has resulted in my own Google Scholar page. It exists as a single, lonesome title on my author page, cited by no one, available nowhere as far as I can tell. This is certainly for the best. I’m in no hurry to reread anything I wrote at 18 or 19!

My first thought when I found this page was “Can I use this to my advantage somehow?” I updated my photo, affiliations, links and otherwise fleshed out the page as well as I could short of, you know, actually authoring something.

So, to answer the question, does having a Google Scholar page help SEO? I have no idea. I can report in the few months since I’ve discovered it it doesn’t appear I’ve received any inbound traffic from that link, and if Google has decided to rank me slightly higher overall as a result it’s not been obvious.

I do predict one peripheral SEO benefit: other people wondering this same thing who decide to Google it might find this blog post :)