Cleaning up your online act
Today’s Toronto Star offers some practical advice for young job applicants that may have littered cyberspace with festive photos of their marathon kegger parties.
1) Delete what you can: Start with your old blogs, purge any for sale advertisements for the unwanted items of your past, any want ads, personal ads or descriptions of yourself on Internet dating sites. Once you’ve done that, turn your attention to the more damning information, like photos on Myspace and Flickr that immortalize your more inebriated moments.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to permanently erase yourself from Facebook, but you can make your account go inactive or you can increase your privacy settings and sign off of any Facebook networks.
2) Contact webmasters: It’s not always easy to figure out who is in charge of a site. In that case, go to Whois.net. From there, punch in the website, contact the webmaster directly and ask that comments by or about you be deleted. You’ll have to play the waiting game until Google and other search engines lose that unwanted data from their caches.
3) Bury the evidence: If the most embarrassing elements of your online existence are found on personal blogs you might want to try creating more favorable content about yourself on higher traffic sites.
Write some letters to the editor of your favourite newspapers or create a Wikipedia entry for yourself. Having your name on such sites will see them float to the top of a Google search of your name.
4) Get protection: If all else fails, there are a few websites out there that offer to protect your online reputation. One of those services is called ReputationDefender, which, for a monthly fee, will track your name online and give you reports on its findings. For a nominal sum it will even contact sites that have published material pertinent to your character.
Tags: Work
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