Protect Your Name on the Internet

Protect Your Name on the Internet

“I was arrested in 2009 I was never formally charged, or the charges were dropped and I was never convicted, but every job I apply for thinks I’m a felon when they look me up on the internet, what do I do?”

As more and more people use the internet to obtain their news and entertain themselves, your reputation becomes more and more tied to what’s online.  The problem is, that a paper newspaper becomes “yesterday’s news” in 24 hours, but the internet is there forever.  This article will discuss some options regarding how to protect your online reputation and “unpublish” the bad stuff written about you online.

Believe it or not, the biggest search engine in the world, Google, is one of the best sources for how to “unpublish” negative information.  Google recommends contacting the publisher of the negative information.  Getting a newspaper to remove defamatory information is possible, but definitely is not the easiest thing in the world to do.  Google will not show the information in search results when the information is no longer online.  Although Google makes it sound instantaneous, I can safely say from experience that it will take some time for the information no longer to be in a search query.