 |
| Disguise yourself on the Web -- without the funny moustache. |
------------------------------
 |
| Combat online rumors with a personal Web site. |
------------------------------
How to Remove or Improve Yourself Online
Laying Low
There are some things you can do to maintain your Internet privacy. It might be asking a lot, but for starters, stop doing things in public. Put an end to your speaking engagements. Stop publishing books, articles and no more blogging or posting to message boards. Popular? Then stop getting people to talk about you. (For an interesting way to measure your popularity on the Web, click here or here).
Even if you don’t run a personal Web site, most people can piece together a simple character sketch by grazing Google search results for snippets of information. Links to scholarly papers written might suggest someone is smart, results from a high school cross country meet says someone was once athletic, or remnants of an Evite invitation could suggest that this person likes to have fun.
So you do a Google search on yourself and don’t like the results. An embarrassing video game review you wrote for your high school newspaper or a photo from a night at Kappa Sigma that you would rather forget. Two words: damage control. One thing you can do is create a Web site for yourself to decrease the search result rankings for the embarrassing stuff. If you can get your own domain name, all the better.
Unless you take a slander case to court, items on the Web are generally difficult to remove from a search engine’s index. For instance, in 2002, a court order forced Google to remove confidential and copyrighted documents of the Church of Scientology from an anti-Scientology Web site, Xenu.com.
Finally, if you maintain a Web site, but don’t want it to be searchable, you can remove it from the search index yourself. Click here for directions from Google.