Today I would like to talk about your personal reputation management. More specifically, how your actions offline can affect you online. So let’s start with a common problem that many of our clients come to us with. Drunk driving (DUI) offenses that have been published in the local paper, which in turn are now showing up in the Google result pages and are hurting the person that was charged.

Yes, the paper has every right to publish your name, because it’s public record the second you are arrested for any type of a crime. They initially publish it in the paper itself, but times have changed, and every newspaper in the country now also has an online edition. You can bet that your name is going to show up there too, along with whatever you have been charged with. In this case, a drunk driving, driving under the influence.

Now this is the most common offense that our clients bring to us, but it’s not the only one. Here are a few other instances we’ve seen:

- Indicted for Embezzlement
- Non Payment of Child Support (Deadbeat Dads and Moms)
- Solicitation of Prostitution
- Failure to Appear
- Failure to Pay
- Drug Purchase or Related Arrest
- Fraud
- White Collar Crimes
- Civil Court Hearings
- Criminal Court Hearings
- Attempted Murder
- Child Abuse
- Animal Cruelty
- Court Settlements
- Small Claims Cases
- Order to Show Cause

Now these are just a few things that might land your name in the paper, but all of them usually end up online, and many of them can seriously hurt your personal online reputation. The reason is simple, more and more people are doing online searches to find out who they are dealing with.

Let me give you some examples. If you are looking for a new job and you have any of the above issues in your past, a simple Google search is going to bring these things to the attention of your perspective employer. Probably stifling any changes you have of getting the job.

Another scenario we see often these days is boyfriends and girlfriends checking out their new partners. They are not only running credit checks, they are running real online background checks and search engine inquiries.

The end result is that these types of negative reports online can seriously hurt your reputation. Understand that the newspaper websites are extremely well liked by the search engine spiders because they are updated often. Google rewards these pages with top listings in the search engines. If your name is in these pages it’s not going to someday fade away as you might hope. In fact, these pages get stronger with age. So if they are already on the front page, but not necessarily number one, they might be floating to the top very soon.

The best thing you can do is take action. Take control of the search engine result pages with a reputation repair plan. You can see our reputation repair packages on this page, and then you are welcome to give us a call at 800-818-6286 so we can get started.