What If You Don't Like What Google Says You Are

When someone googles your name, are the search results positive or negative? Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst of Google, recommends these following tips to manage your reputation online.

The first step in reputation management is preemptive: Think twice before putting your personal information online.

If something you dislike has already been published, the next step is to try to remove it from the site where it's appearing.

• Remove the undesired content. It will naturally drop out of search results after Google recrawls the page and discovers the change.
• Contact the site's webmaster and ask them to remove the content or the page in question.
• Expedite the removal of that content from Google using our URL removal tool.

Proactively publish information
If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don't want them to see, you'll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation. You can publish or encourage positive content in a variety of ways:

• Create a Google profile. It will show up in the search results when someone googles your name.
• Ask customers who are happy with your company to give you a testimonial to post online.

In closing, maintain your professional demeanor online as you would in person. Only create and post content, including photos and videos, that you want to be indexed permanently by Google.