I’m guilty of doing vanity searches of myself on occasion, purely out of curiosity. So far none of the results returned anything dramatic.
A few other people I personally know aren’t so fortunate. One person who’s close to me had a court order information in the top 3 results for the person’s name in Google. For Sabahans, you should be wary of any news coming out of The New Sabah Times (one of the most read dailies this side of Borneo). This paper is notorious for putting people’s bankruptcy notices and home foreclosures online. Imagine your long lost friend or your former schoolmate trying to find you on the Internet and then ended up seeing those type of info about you. Embarrassing, to say the least.
So what do you do if you want to hide those incriminating evidence out of the search engines? You do SEO. The easiest way to go by this is to register yourself using your full name in as many social networking sites as possible, and the more popular those social networks are, the better. That should help bury those little secrets way into the nether regions of your search result (gosh this sounds so dirty).
But the best way, really, to keep searches about you clean, is to not do any real life mistake as you possibly can. I’m not telling you to be Jesus or anything. I’m just saying that whatever that you wish to type online, make sure that it wouldn’t haunt you back or make a fool out of yourself (unless that’s what you’re aiming for, looking like a fool).
Seriousness aside, check out my first ever smartphone, the HTC HD7. I accidentally got this, because my better half couldn’t use it to run Meta Trader (I told him to get an Android phone, like Samsung Galaxy… in case I “accidentally” inherit that if MT doesn’t work on that as well). Loving the HTC phone, hating the Windows 7 Phone OS. At least let me use a customized MP3 song of my choice for my ringtone, for crap’s sake!
I’m jailbreaking this thing.
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Gosh, now you make me very curious. I’d do that whole googling myself later.
pardon me for my ignorance, but what’s a SEO when you mentioned hiding incriminating evidence out of the search engines?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation. Simply put, you optimise your content for a particular keyword or topic so that whenever people searches for that topic, your web page will appear in the top of the results compared to other sites.
Hi Lorna!
I’ve never gave that a thought, searching my full name on the net. Thanks for the heads up.
After reading your post, I googled myself up and got to know the first names of Elvis Presley’s parents. His mom’s same as my first name and dad’s similar to my second.
I swear, that’s purely accidental.
LOL! Have you ever asked your parents about how your name came about? Who knows — they may have named you that on purpose!
been hearing SEO a lot. tried to use it but i fail. or maybe i need to read more. i do google myself once in a while, mainly because i wanted to know if someone else have the same name as i am. a lot of search result, thank God all of them are good. *phew*
So this week post.
There are many SEO techniques out there, so you’ll have to just stick to one, or a few if you can handle it. Glad your searches are clean 🙂
thats why I started to remove the embarrasing pics of my college days from social networks and other places
How else are you going to check out how well you’re doing with SEO?
I totally agree with you. I have a few friends that would not like what they see. I have read articles saying that some people will have to change their name to avoid the permanency of what they have done as kids on the web.
I forgot to add that the part about signing up for as many social sites is a great idea i will have to pass that along, i didn’t think about that.
I googled myself up and remove the pics of my college 🙂