As a grad student at UPenn, I have access to the subdomain seas.upenn.edu/~lindsb/, in which I built a simple personal website. This domain showed up in the top 5 results on Google when I typed in Ben Lindsay, I assume because it belongs to upenn.edu, a relatively well-respected website. I assume this because I did nothing intentional to try to improve SEO and probably did not do anything magical by accident. About a year ago, I moved my site to benjlindsay.com, which looks much nicer than the previous domain name, but it doesn't show up anywhere on a Google search for my name. I just put in a meta tag in my UPenn domain that redirects to my newer domain name today.My question is, is there some way to make use of the UPenn subdomain to get benjlindsay.com to show up in the top 5?
Can I use school subdomain to raise personal .com domain ranking?
seo
If you want search engines to take notice that your site  moved, you need to implement 301 redirects. In general, bots do not follow redirects via meta tags.Another option would be to use canonical tag, however keep in mind that 301 is better.As for the ranking aspect in general - just stick to normal website development, give it some time, add some social signals from Twitter, G+, LinkedIn, GitHub (for example, your public LinkedIn profile shows the correct link, but GitHub still links to the edu domain).On your personal site, make one about me page and implement person schema. Link back to your social footprint. Sample code:<script type=application/ld+json>{  @context: http://www.schema.org,  @type: person,  name: Something Something,  url: https://example.com/,  image: https://example.com/images/me.jpg,  sameAs : [    https://www.twitter.com/someid,    https://www.twitter.com/anotherid,    https://plus.google.com/+someID/posts,    https://www.linkedin.com/in/someid,    https://github.com/someid  ],  jobTitle: Something,  telephone: +1234567890,  worksFor: Some Corp, Inc.,  description: Some description} </script>Getting a rank for [first name last name] with exact match domain should be rather easy.