You must be aware of the pitfalls and continually monitor all mentions about you if you want to protect and preserve your online reputation. Make a periodical cleanup to ensure nothing damaging about you stays too long on the internet.
Employment candidates must be watchful and understand how their online reputation can adversely affect their job prospects. Online reputation is invaluable and more people are realizing that what they do online — and what others say about them online — can play a role in determining whether they get employed or dismissed.
Remember that when you post a video, it may be online forever – regardless how stupid it makes you look. The same thing applies to blog posts, forum discussions, photo albums and even emails you send to friends. You never know what will spread from the private sphere to the public realm.
You therefore need to be thoughtful and deliberate when posting online. If it is too late, you should know what cleaning work you have to do instead of pressing the panic button.
First and foremost, determine what damaging information about you exists online. Enter your name at Google and other major search engines and see what turns up in the first four pages of search results. Anything undesirable calls for immediate action.
Sign up for the alerts available at spots like Google Alert to help know when mentions are made about you online. You’ll find out via email. Monitoring your reputation in this manner may be tedious and time-consuming, but your online reputation is precious.
An item doesn’t need to be outrageous to hurt your fair name or spoil your job prospects. “If it raises a shadow of a doubt about the candidate, the employer is not going to hire that person,” says Ross Chanin, vice president of operations for ReputationDefender.
If you had done something silly — maybe a month ago or maybe even a decade ago. Now you want to make sure no one finds that record of your stupidity. You will have suppress the bad and inundate the internet will all good references about you.
That means you create new helpful content about yourself, such as a blog or Web site. You can not make the adverse stuff disappear. But you make so much more good stuff that you can’t find the bad stuff lost and disappear into the fifth or lower pages of search results.
Make sure you create worthwhile material that shows you in good light. If possible, publish your writing at respected sources, such as industry publications. After all, publishing your own material makes it obvious it came from you and users will appreciate your worth.