How to Clean Up Your Online Reputation
We have all done something stupid online. Maybe it was posting a video about a party we attended or some photographs that should never have been uploaded. You might have said something offensive and worry it might hurt your prospects of finding a job or their reputation. Well, we all know that once something is online, it is likely to live on there forever, which makes it harder to ensure nobody ever finds the things we do not want them to. That said, there is a way to ensure your online presence reflects who you are today, and that is by cleaning up your online reputation. Here’s how.
See How Much Damage Is Already Done
The first thing to do is to see what information is available about you. Search your name on a search engine and see what comes up. Try to go to other sections like the news and images to see what might be hiding there. It is also a good idea to search all the usernames you use on various social media platforms as the results you get from searching them might reveal quite a lot about you.
Once you see something that is troubling, take note of it. Then sign up for search engine alerts so you know when information you have about you is added or updated.
Hire a Company to Do a Background Check
If you do not have a lot of unsavory material on social media, your background might have some things you might not want others to see. To deal with this, you need to know what it is. One way of doing this is to hire a company that does background checks. This will reveal everything about you including any records you have with law enforcement authorities. If you think there is something too personal to be seen by a company, you can go to https://www.publicrecordsreviews.com/background-checks to perform your own background check. Public Records Review is a useful platform that lets you find any publicly-available records and information about different people including yourself. It is a quick and easy-to-use platform.
Bury the Material
Remember when we said everything lives forever online? That is true for 99.9% of everything you post or upload. Since all this material cannot be deleted, the best course of action might be to bury it under better, positive material. Start by creating a website or blog that has positive information about you. Post to the website or blog regularly and alert search engine bots about the new website or blog. That way, when this new material gets indexed, the older material you would not like to be seen will be less likely to be found.
Another way to go about it is to post your new material on reputable sources. If you do not want it to seem obvious that the material came from you, you can hire several virtual assistants to post the content for you. You can also do this for your social media profiles where you post a lot of new, positive material so that it becomes the first thing people see when they look you up online.
Request Removal and Deletions
If you have a strong case for your material to be removed or deleted from some sources, take it slow. If you come out too aggressively, it could be a PR nightmare for you and undo all the work you are doing. If there are some serious issues like libel, defamation, and inaccuracies, pointing out those issues will help too.
Remember to check to whom you are sending these requests. If it is an aggressive blog, this move might be bad for you. Some of these blogs will post the emails you send them requesting the removal of your information which will make things much worse.
Hire a Service
If you do not have the time to do all this, or if there is too much information about you in the public domain, hire a company to clean your reputation for you. These companies will scour the internet looking for information about you and deal with it. They will also keep an eye on social media and on search engines to deal with any new information that is added or changed. Just remember that these services can be quite expensive depending on what you need to be done.
Clean Up Your Public Image
All the work you do to clean your online reputation can be undermined by what you do in real life. If you start cleaning your online reputation and still create fodder that blogs, websites and other platforms can use against you, all the hard work you will have done will be for nothing.
People will often search your name when they want to know who you are and what you are about. If you find there is information you would not like anyone else to find online, look for ways to remove it or bury it.
