It is the largest people search engine in the world and I’d recommend it for anyone wanting to manage their personal online rep.

@ Jon – You raise some excellent questions. Rather than responding to them all, I will write a new blog post with my take on your questions. Thanks for the input.

@ Angie – It’s good to know that colleges are preparing students for the real world. These things didn’t exist when I went to school

@ Beth – Funny you should mention that. When my wife and I were dating I Googled her name and found an adult site with her name (also a fairly common name). I figured marrying her would cure that… and it did

@ Jacob – Thanks for the link. I will check it out.

@ Daniel – I know it can be a challenge. If it were a problem I think I would want to be up front in whatever situation and let the right people know up front that I was not that same person in question.

I blogged what was called “The mother of all resources and tips to manage your online reputation”, which will tell you how to do both those things:

190+ Resources and Tips To Help Manage Your Reputation Online

I have a common name – Beth Robinson – and there are others who have even more common ones. I can proactively provide links to my sites in my contact info and make sure that they are tied together, even the personal ones. I could emphasize a business name instead.

But part of the point of searching for someone is to see if there’s something that they are not telling you. If, for example, a woman with the same name decided to go into adult entertainment and becomes popular, then there’s very little I can do except hope my potential business partner or employer is doing their due diligence, not just taking a quick glance at Google.

Or do you have other suggestions?

There are several examples of it on the web: people losing a job because of a frustrated tweet, the Pork Board fiasco, the battle between Digg and the movie industry, and the list really does go on.

In fact, experts are now suggesting that graduates build and mold their online reputations long before graduation. You might be interested in hearing the lecture Lee Hopkins has put out recently on LeeHopkins.net. Here’s one example here: http://cli.gs/SrjjB1

In reality, I think it’s something they should start to teach in high school, or at least make students aware that what’s done is done, but what goes on the Internet lives forever.

Angie Haggstrom
Freedom Freelance

So, follow-up questions: Do we simply need to change privacy settings for sites that have personal information? Do we need to create two separate online identities (one “personal”, one “professional”)? Do we avoid all mention online of our employer or related workplace topics? Or do we simply add disclaimers to every personal site, stating that our opinions are our own and have no bearing on any personal or professional affiliations?

Although I do want to say that a certain amount of transparency is needed so that folks know that you are a real human being they are dealing with online and not a bot.