In this post I am sharing an observation about some newer public LinkedIn pages. It's quite fascinating what we are seeing! Read on.

Note: To try out some of the following content and access the right links, it's best to log out of LinkedIn.

The LinkedIn.com home page has links to various directories:

It includes a Title Directory. If you browse the directory, you will see the "endpoint" pages that look like this: https://www.linkedin.com/title/benefits-specialist-at-ibm. (Don't forget to log out or use an incognito window - it's the only way to view the right content). The URLs for these pages start with linkedin.com/title; the page titles usually say something like "Top 25 (or 24, 23)   such-and-such specialists at <company>". Some page titles also include location names. What "Top" means in this context is a mystery; we'll skip investigating that at the moment.

As all public pages, these "/title" pages help to drive traffic to LinkedIn. It's an SEO (search engine optimization) thing.

So, using Google, we can X-Ray the title directory in this fashion: site:linkedin.com/title (add keywords). This X-raying capability is not new; we have been able to X-Ray the title directory for several years now.

A few months ago the "title directory" started being populated with pages that sound different from the above example, "benefits-specialist-at-ibm".

Without going into much detail, I will share some example results that come up in X-Raying the /title directory. Here's an example using my name and a couple keywords:

"irina shamaeva" sourcing certification site:linkedin.com/title

(Somehow, at this point, the results contain "top 25 webmasters"; I have never been a webmaster!)

You can do similar X-Ray searches for your name and other professionals' names. Add a few keywords, as in the example above, to make sure it's that professional's profile that will appear in the results. Let me know what you find!

Then, here are some other searches:

1) site:linkedin.com/title/fake (42 results at the moment)

2) site:linkedin.com/title/what (currently, 265 results - including the Top 24 What Not Profiles!)

3) site:linkedin.com/title/not is also interesting:

Though I saw some concerns from some members who also noticed the /title pages availability in X-Ray searches, I don't think there are privacy issues related to it. I do know that there are new ways to Source using this relatively new expansion of public LinkedIn pages. :)