Your Online Reputation - Damage Control

I attended an online university a few years ago that was involved in a dispute with an unhappy former student, and in retaliation for whatever had displeased him, that unhappy student had set up a "spoof" site online that looked very much like the university's website. From that spoof site, he proceeded to use the search engines to find any faculty or students (including myself) who had listed the name of the university in our e-Resumes or online biographies, and to mock and insult us on the fake university site. The idea was to embarrass the university into complying with the demands of the former student and/or settling out of court in the ongoing lawsuit. For a period of time this derogatory information was among the first entries that appeared in a Google Search for my name. When I contacted the university, I was told that they may be pursuing legal action, but that they were limited in what they could do, really, because of "free speech" laws. I was in the process of looking for a job at the time, and didn't have time to wait for the university to settle its dispute with this former student. At the time, I didn't know what to do, so I simply had to be proactive in explaining to my prospective employers what had happened, and what they were likely to find when they did their background searches. Fortunately, they understood. You don't have to learn the hard way like I did. Here are three steps you can take to quickly minimize damage to your online profile, or "digital reputation." 1. If you are being impersonated online and someone is claiming to be you, immediately contact the website administrator or the web host where this is happening, and work with them to have the information taken down. This will usually not work if you simply disagree with what has been said about you on the site, or even if the information about you is incorrect, but only if someone is falsely claiming to be you. 2. Establish and beef-up your online profile. This can be done through reputable social networking sites, through your own blog, and through your online resume and portfolio. 3. Publish good information online that people will want to link to. At first, you'll need to get as many of your friends as possible to link to your blog, articles, and profiles, then others will begin to link to you. Remember to also cross-link to your blog from your various social networking profiles, and vice-versa. All of this "link love," will begin to push the positive information about you ahead of the negative information on the search engine results pages (SERPs). While following these steps will not completely eliminate negative information about you from the web, it will help assure that when prospective employers, clients, or dates Google your name, they'll find something you want them to see on that first page. Jennifer Pointer is an avid web-a-holic. She has an educational background in distance learning and instructional design for online learning, and loves to help people with online profile management and social networking with a purpose.