techslog

Google your name and see the multitude of articles and associations that have your name associated with them, what does this mean to your career?
I had a friend who worked as a consultant. She relied upon her reputation to gain work and knew that potential customers would “google” her to learn more about her and her work. She had a client that was not paying and had a hard time understanding the value in my friends work, despite the clients initial pleas that my friend work for her to help her business. The customer, instead of paying for the services provided, decided to hold my friends reputation hostage by posting incredible “Letters to the DA” to malign the consultant, and posted them to high ranking sites that came up in the top three rankings when you googled my friends name!
My friend reached out to her attorney who pretty much stated there is not much he can do since the internet is a public domain.
This situation is one of a few I have heard in regards to a google profile-
I heard of an IT consultant passing their tech screens and interviews only to be denied the job because his “My Space” profile was pretty raunchy.
Woman Google potential internet dates, to make sure they are not having lunch with a pedophile.
I recently had a member of my playgroup Google me to make sure I was not hosting a “playgroup” for financial gain, or to exploit the members. There is a lot of googling going on how does it affect your career?

If I were looking for a job I would absolutely google my name to see what kind of information came up- So how can you safeguard your Google profile?

First recognize that whenever you post on the internet with your name, there are three audiences you should recognize-
One -is your target audience, or just the folks you are crafting this post for today.
Second- is the Public Audience, folks that stumble upon your post accidentally, or were sent to your post via a search engine, perhaps as a potential customer, or as a match to whatever key word they Googled.
The third is for people researching you- they may be benign in checking you before they call you for work etc. They maybe competitors, scoping out who you are or what you do. But they just could be all sorts of people I would rather NOT see any soft underbelly I might have or my “dirty laundry” that is private.

What if I don’t like what I see in my google search? How can I erase this misconception of my profile so others don’t see the “dark underbelly”?

Building up a web profile is like starting a marathon, takes a bit of time to get going on the long journey,; and alas breaking down a web profile can be the same slow process.
Search engines cache pages and some make a point of keeping copies and content over the years.

Tips-
Visit posts on forums you wish you had not posted, and where you can edit them. Where you can’t, send a friendly message to the administrator, and ask for their help.
Alter pages that you can’t control yourself to remove the problem content and perhaps provide a “Graveyard page”. That’s far better than deleting the page, as anyone who searches for the page should be given the new copy (what you want) and not the cached copy (what you don’t want). With a deleted page, all the search engine can offer is the cache.
Where you don’t control a page, you may control or influence come links to it. Change these.
If you’ve access to the robots.txt file, tell the search engines to exclude pages that you no longer want indexed.
In an extreme case, you may wish to ask search engines to de-list you; you should find details of how to request ths on their sites.
If you don’t like content on a page that’s NOT under your control, you should go through and ask the information provider, then the webmaster to remove the content. Friendly is usually the best way to approach this, since you re giving them more work.

1. KEYWORDS are your friend. Use them. EVERY photo. Make them meaningful. Here's our help section on them: http://www.smugmug.com/help/keywords-tags

2. Captions, descriptions: be sure and write good ones, and make them search friendly!

3. Start a BLOG

4. Post to other blogs, forums, etc - and have your website linked!

5. Get other sites to link to you