personal-presence-os

Linking domains so reputation flows both ways

  • shipped
  • reputation
  • structured-data
  • crosslinks
  • llm-discoverability
  • seo

The problem

Running multiple domains fragments your reputation. wardleymaps.com has been running since 2013 — community forum, curated resource list, mapping tools, strategic guides for C-suite and enterprise architects. None of that reputation was flowing to kda.zone. And kda.zone's claim to run wardleymaps.com was a throwaway line buried in the about page.

Search engines, LLMs, and humans all face the same question when they land on one of your domains: who runs this, and should I trust them? If the answer requires detective work across multiple sites, most visitors — human or machine — won't bother.

What shipped

Five changes on the kda.zone side, plus a documented checklist for the wardleymaps.com side.

On kda.zone (this repo)

rel="me" on the footer link. The footer link to wardleymaps.com changed from rel="noopener" to rel="me noopener". This is the HTML-level identity ownership signal used by IndieWeb verification, search engines, and increasingly by LLM crawlers. One attribute, high impact.

Schema.org Person with sameAs. Added an author block to sites.yaml with sameAs pointing to wardleymaps.com, community.wardleymaps.com, and github.com/cdaniel. The engine now emits a Person in JSON-LD on every kda.zone page:

"author": {
  "@type": "Person",
  "name": "KDA",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://wardleymaps.com",
    "https://community.wardleymaps.com",
    "https://github.com/cdaniel"
  ]
}

This is the structured-data signal that tells machines: the person behind this site is the same entity that runs those other domains. Google's knowledge graph, Bing, and LLM retrieval systems all consume JSON-LD.

Content-level attribution. Rewrote kda.zone's about page and projects page to name wardleymaps.com with concrete reputation signals — not "I run a mapping site" but: running since 2013, community forum, curated resource list, Atlas mapping tools (one sponsored by the Leading Edge Forum). Specifics transfer reputation. Vague references don't.

llms_description update. The llms_description for kda.zone in sites.yaml now explicitly states the wardleymaps.com relationship, duration, and scope. This feeds directly into llms.txt, which LLMs use as a primary discovery mechanism.

Engine change

site.author support in JSON-LD. The layout engine now reads site.author.name and site.author.sameAs from sites.yaml and emits a Person block in the page's JSON-LD. This is generic — any site in the content farm can use it by adding an author block to its config. No domain names hardcoded in application code.

On wardleymaps.com (separate repo, not yet done)

The kda.zone side is a one-way claim until wardleymaps.com links back. Three changes needed there:

  1. Reciprocal rel="me" — add <a href="https://kda.zone" rel="me"> in the footer or about page. Bidirectional rel="me" is what search engines treat as a verified identity link.
  2. Schema.org author — add a Person with url: "https://kda.zone" to the JSON-LD.
  3. About page or llms.txt attribution — name KDA as maintainer with a link to kda.zone.

The generalised pattern

This isn't a one-off integration. Every domain in the content farm — and every external domain claimed as "mine" — needs the same treatment. The full checklist is codified in decision 0002.

The short version, ordered by impact:

  1. Bidirectional rel="me" — highest value single signal
  2. Schema.org Person with sameAs — structured data for machines
  3. Content attribution with specifics — for humans and LLMs reading prose
  4. llms.txt mention — for LLM-specific discovery

Why this matters for the engine

The ChatGPT evaluation showed that credibility to an AI is signal density, not content quality. A site with no external footprint looks identical to a site with no content. Cross-domain linking is one of the few signals you can create yourself without waiting for third parties to discover you. It's not a substitute for external mentions — but it's the foundation that makes external mentions land somewhere coherent.

The engine already handles llms.txt, Schema.org JSON-LD, and Open Graph tags. Cross-domain identity linking is the fourth layer: telling every consumer of these pages that the same person stands behind all of them.