Public LinkedIn Profile Viewing and Searching.

Public LinkedIn Profiles.

Your LinkedIn Profile can appear very different to different viewers. The default "Edit Profile" view you have of your own profile is not quite what connections see, while LinkedIn users who are not Connections will see something else again and the general public (viewers who are not logged on to LinkedIn) will see something else entirely.

To configure how this public profile looks, you can click the little cog just to the right of the public profile URL which appears under your photo.

You can also choose to customize this URL of your publicly viewable profile.

Public versions of LinkedIn Profiles are Google searchable. Using Google search instead of LinkedIn's inbuilt search is sometimes called "X-ray" searching.

Unfortunately, the custom URL option creates a bit of headache for those of us who use X-ray search for sourcing and recruiting - there are then two seperate places where profiles are stored. Some public profiles can be found under linkedin.com/in and some are under linkedin.com/pub. Even more irritating, there is also a subdirectory linkedin.com/pub/dir where names are also stored without the profile, which tend to come up unwanted in simple searches.

So if you were google searching for my profile, say, in order to make sure you find it, the Google search syntax would be

site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -pub/dir gary sharpe

Yuk! The -pub/dir bit excludes anything in the "useless" subdirectory mentioned above, by the way.