Why Your Google Reputation Could Lose You That New Job
January 25, 2008 – 1:47 pmCanada’s largest daily newspaper, the Globe and Mail, did an in-depth look at how your reputation on Google can effect your chances of landing a new job.
Radically Transparent coauthor Andy Beal, was interviewed for the story. Here’s an extract:
Andy Beal is an Internet marketing consultant with Raleigh, N.C.-based Marketing Pilgrim and co-author of Radically Transparent, a book about managing personal and professional identities online. He works with clients to improve the results returned when their names are searched using Google.
“If a client comes to me with something negative in their search results and wants it pushed out [of the first page of links returned by Google], we have to find ten other pieces of information about them that are positive and get those things to appear before the negative,” he said. “The problem is that scandal is popular. People like to talk about it, and they like to link to negative stories. Google’s algorithm looks at all of those links and thinks that [the page to which these links lead] must be highly relevant to the search query. We have to convince Google that there are other pages with information that is just as relevant.”
It can be an expensive process. Mr. Beal said his clients spend between $3,000 and $10,000 to clean up their search results, and, due to the chaotic nature of the Internet, he can offer no guarantees that, at the end of the day, searching his client’s name will result in nothing but squeaky clean results.
That’s why he recommends that people begin managing their Internet identities before any undesirable information appears online by registering a domain containing a person’s name, or creating personal and professional pages on networking sites like MySpace and Linked In.
“Build up credibility in the eyes of Google,” said Mr. Beal. “You’re being searched all the time, whether you know it or not.”
