co-workers, or other relationships described in Chapter 7 faces a
substantial risk of online attack.
The Need for Positive Content
Some people require more Internet exposure than others. If you
want to be a motivational speaker, a politician, or a celebrity, then you
need a massive Google trail of results. For you, “image is everything.”
The first few items in your online résumé will create a frame through
which almost every searcher will view you. To take an example, if the
first few search results for your name are a debate about whether you
are the best motivational speaker in your field, then most readers will
automatically assume the frame that you are a good speaker. In con-
trast, if the first few pages debate whether an allegation of miscon-
duct is true, then readers will look at all other pages through the lens
of potential misconduct. It is vital that you present truthful positive
information at the top of a search so that you can set the right kind
of frame. If you want online fame, then you will also have to make
sure that your total online profile is deep: it is all but guaranteed that
Internet users will search far and wide online to learn more about
you and maybe even to try to dig up some embarrassing photos or
questionable quotes.
Even if you just want to be famous within a small group—as the
best house DJ in Miami, the best neo-Fluxus painter in Seattle, the
best classic-car restorer in the Midwest, or the best cosmetic derma-
tologist in Houston—your online image is everything. It is absolutely
crucial that relevant positive content appear at the top of a Google
search for your name or for your specialty. Internet users have figured
out how to gauge celebrity on the basis of the Google results for a
search term. If a search for your name returns only one or two relevant
results, you will appear to be relatively unknown in your field.
On the other hand, if all you want is privacy and anonymity, don’t
close this book yet. Even if you don’t want to use the Internet to ad-
vance yourself, you still have to protect your image from online attack.
However, the challenge is very different: If you just seek privacy, it
Wild West 2.0198
may be desirable for any information about you to be hidden behind
people with similar or identical names. For you, detailed awareness
and constant monitoring will be crucial to your success. You will still
need to work hard at protecting and monitoring your online reputa-
tion, but the goals of the monitoring will be very different.
Of course, if you have been attacked online, the decision about
putting information online has already been made for you. You may
be able to remove some malicious content, but it is not always possi-
ble to remove it all. At a minimum, you will need to make sure that
there is enough positive or neutral content out there to overwhelm
the online smear.
For those in the middle, who seek neither fame nor complete ob-
scurity, a moderate strategy is appropriate. It is not crucial that the
first result of a Google search for your name be a glowing review, but
it is still important to control the general tenor of an online search
for your name. And it is still important that you build a solid defense
against online attack, lest you become the next victim of online attack.
How to Perform Active Defense
If you want to truly own your Google results, then there must be
enough positive and neutral content about yourself to completely block
out any false or misleading information that might come along later.
This is the ultimate form of “Google insurance.” You can accomplish
this goal in three ways:
1. Creating positive and neutral content about yourself, and work-
ing to make sure that it is recognized by search engines as rele-
vant and important by carefully linking to it
2. Encouraging other people to create positive or neutral content
about you
3. Bolstering the visibility of existing positive and neutral content
about you
Getting Proactive: The Best Defense Is a Good Offense 19 9
200 Wild West 2.0
Create Your Own Content
The first form of active defense is to create your own content to serve
as a buffer against false, misleading, or negative search results. By
building positive content now, you will create a Google wall that helps
to keep false negative content out of the top Google search results.
You may use any means to create your own positive or neutral con-
tent so long as it is truthful and likely to be found by a search engine.
Positive content, as the name suggests, paints you in a good light.
Information about your career, accomplishments, and achievements
counts as positive content. So does content that makes you appear
social, outgoing, and friendly—such as smiling photographs with
friends or powerful people.
Neutral content is content that doesn’t affect your reputation di-
rectly. A website that simply lists your name as part of a directory is a
form of neutral content: it does not make you look good or bad. Neu-
tral content can be an extremely effective part of online reputation de-
fense, even though it does not directly improve your reputation.
Instead, neutral content can be used to make false negative information
more difficult to find. For example, if the first page of results for a
search for your name returns all neutral content, then very few people
will see negative content on subsequent pages. Neutral content is also
beneficial in that it usually does not appear self-promotional or oth-
erwise questionable; it simply fills up your online résumé with unob-
jectionable material that serves as a buffer against negative content.
When creating positive and neutral content, it is important to
think about how it will be considered by search engines. Most search
engines—including Google—use a variety of factors to determine
the order in which to display search results. These factors include the
popularity of the web page and the website (as measured by the
number of incoming links) and the number of times that a search
term (your name) appears in the text of the website. Further, most
search engines will not prominently display more than one or two
pages from any website in a search: if there are 100 relevant pages
about you on one website, only one or two will be displayed.
The most effective strategy to build positive and neutral content
is thus often to build content across a variety of sites and to link
these sites as much as possible. For example, it might make sense to
create a personal blog on your own domain (if your name is Steve
Jobs, then at www.stevejobs.com) that contains your name promi-
nently in the title. Then, create a profile on a networking site like
LinkedIn and link to your personal blog from your LinkedIn profile.
Then create a Google Profile and link to your blog and LinkedIn
profiles from it. Then create a second, placeholder blog at a private
blogging site and link from it to any or all of the above. The details
will vary greatly according to your exact situation. Figure 11-2
shows how a hypothetical person might set up a series of links that
Figure 11-2. Link-Building to Success. Use several different sites to carefully link
to positive and neutral online content in order to help maintain its popularity in
search engines. This content can bolster your online reputation or serve as a buffer
against false and misleading negative information.
201Getting Proactive: The Best Defense Is a Good Offense
202 Wild West 2.0
would help ensure that favorable information shows up near the top
of a Google search.
Be careful when creating your own online content. Do not lie
or exaggerate under any circumstances; when the truth eventually
comes out, the damage will be significant. Boastfulness is also an
invitation for trouble; an online résumé that is too positive will
stand out as unusual. Instead, write simple truthful content that
reflects your interests and achievements without bragging or excess
pride. Be creative when generating new content: think about all
of your interactions and how you could use them to create new
content.
Some of the easiest methods of creating positive and neutral con-
tent are listed here:
? Blogging. As part of claiming your identity, you should have
claimed your name as a username at some of the major blog sites.
Set up a blog and periodically update it with new content—
maybe once or twice a week. If your name is prominently dis-
played in the title (for example, “The Official Blog of Steve Jobs”)
and you periodically update it with new and relevant content, it
is likely to become a secure and important part of your online
résumé. Be creative when deciding what to blog about: You can
blog about your family, your neighborhood, your profession, your
favorite sports team, or anything else. Just be sure that the con-
tent comes across as appropriate and well written.
? Tw i t t e r i n g . Similarly, Twitter allows “microblogging,” short, 140-
character updates that are designed to be easier and faster to cre-
ate and to read than a full blog. Use the service to provide periodic
updates and to link to other positive and neutral content.
? Profile Sites. There are several free and paid services, such as
Naymz and PeoplePond, that allow users to create a short per-
sonal profile and to link to other relevant sites. Use these services
to link to other positive and neutral content.
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