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Personal online reputation management

July 2nd, 2008 Jason Posted in seo |

I had someone at work hit me up the other day for some personal advice. Thanks to some misadventures several years ago, when you Google her name there’s a couple very negative articles from a couple very high-profile sites sitting in prominent positions in the SERPs. Obviously, this is something she’d rather a prospective employer not see. So she asked what she could do.

Here’s my first email back to her.

‘Online reputation management’ is a big issue these days thanks to situations exactly like this. I thought I’d send over a few articles which talk about it.

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3628265
This is a good, broad overview.

http://www.stuntdubl.com/2007/07/11/reputation-management/
This is very much centered on *personal * reputation rather than a brand.

http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2007/03/27/online-reputation-management-basics
This is very brand-focused, but it still applies: Your name is your brand.

http://blog.venture-skills.co.uk/2006/11/09/top-5-ways-to-establish-an-internet-identity/
Even if you’re established already, there’s more places you can be, over which you’ll have more control down the road.

http://www.seroundtable.com/tag/reputation%20management Links to a bunch of other articles which may be of interest.

The theme you’ll probably see is that t here are no silver bullets, but there’s definitely things you can do. The fact that those articles/comments are now 2 years old will probably help - feed the search engines some new information that’s more up-to-date, and the older stuff should fall away. You won’t get rid of them entirely, but off the first page of results would be a great start.

Think of it as a bit of an advertising campaign for yourself; like any campaign, there’s some thought and planning that needs to go into it, but it can be done.

I’m intrigued by this as an exercise because of the challenges involved. If she doesn’t own (and use) her-name.com then is there value in starting it up now? Possibly, but that alone isn’t going to take down the very well established site which contains - admittedly - some very valid commentary. So, what to do?

Look for specific ideas from me later.