When a future employer, friend or business acquaintance searches for you online who do you want them to find? Do you want them to find an old MySpace or Facebook account where you were acting like a complete fool? What would a recruiter think of those pictures of you half naked and drunk? Good times, for sure yes BUT… would those images help land the job? How about a current employer who is looking for a few people to layoff?

We all know that people change but do not expect someone searching for you online to understand, you are judged by the traces you leave behind. The internet is a canvas, what have you painted on it? Think of the person you used to be in High School, is he/she you today? Go to your High School reunion and observe how people remember you. We go on what we know about others from the limited information we obtain. In life outside of the internet it is from memories that fade, online it is stamped in HTML, text and images which in most cases are permanent.

Not a week passes when I find a person in Google Groups complaining that their name is coming up in search from a news site, blog or other media with information destructive to their reputations. There is no way to remove news stories that get buzz (links in search engines) but if you were online first, (and own your own name) you could respond with a fresh post to your blog explaining or defending yourself.

If you care about your internet footprint there are ways to erase or cleanup your act, my best advice is to:

1.) Register your name as a domain and put up a little content on it like I did here.

2.) Link it to your Facebook account after you remove all those trashy, superficial friends and limit it to close friends and family.

3.) Go ahead and delete your MySpace account if you are not fond of it.

Webmasters: If you are like me and have several domains that are just not amusing you anymore remove the content, block the waybackmachine or redirect and burn. There are also other things you can do that I will not mention here.

I myself do not really care about my name all that much, I am not famous, work for myself and never plan to work for anyone else on a long term basis. My past online is also not damaging enough to destroy my reputation if I do decide to become more “known”. I manage my reputation because I believe everyone should, it is smart…

If you are the type that relies on others for employment or are more well known in this world, then taking a few steps to clean up your act online (by establishing an online presence) for your name can go a long way. Do it today before a story destroys you tomorrow!

I am looking to build out in a new direction which can be complicated. For those of you who know anything about removing content and changing the course of a website this can lead to all kinds of issues because search engines are very primative. In order to succeed I must rebrand and develop a new flavor to get human exposure from organic search. With organic search comes links and yes, traffic.

You also might have heard the line “Do not build websites for search engines, build them for humans” but there will be no humans visiting if the site does not rank for a few things in organic search.

I review items to help others out in finding stuff they are looking for online so it fills a purpose, wish me luck!

Update: I had a second thought and renamed the site Abby’s Pet Gifts & Supplies to not limit it to just dogs.