This past week I had a friend complain to me about how his college writings were following him everywhere he went. He’s now working in a government office, and his reputation matters a lot to him. “We change a lot, even if it is only a year after we are out of college.”
He’s right. As we get older, the things we used to believe change and evolve. Unfortunately, we can’t do much about the things we put on the internet 5, 10, and 15 years ago. They’re there forever—stuck. So the question is what do we do about the results surrounding our name that we’re not happy with.
That’s where reputation management comes in.
He called his college paper and asked to have his name changed on the articles he wrote. Not surprisingly, they refused to change his name. So what’s his alternative? He can use some of the same techniques that we use with searchEGO. If he wants to he can spend a lot of time using SEO tactics to crowd out the results he doesn’t want online. The more uncommon your name, the easier it is to see results.
One of the best ways to drive your name up in the search results is to build links around your name. You want to get clickable links that are pointing to your website or profiles whose text is your name. For example, to drive my Facebook Profile up in Google’s rankings I’d get an anchor text to my profile with the text Joshua Unseth (if you click on it, why don’t you invite me to be your friend). This is particularly effective when it comes to sculpting an online profile for yourself as you send out resumes—the time when people might actually Google your name.
The two biggest link brokers are Text Link Ads and LinkXL. But beware, Google frowns on link buying as a method for ranking higher. It’s not a big deal if you do just a little bit of it. But if you buy tons of links and Google notices, they’ve been known to penalize sites (sometimes even dropping them out of their results). If you want to try though, buying links is cheap enough that you can buy a junk domain and just experiment. See how well and how quickly it works. Take it from me, a little bit of link-buying alongside some organic link building (those links that just come to you over time when other people or bots discover your content) goes along way.
If you’re interested in more discussion about link buying, check out Aaron Wall’s post on how to buy links, or speak to a searchEGO representative for more information on how we can manage your reputation management campaign for you.