Protecting Your Web Cred from Hackers, Whackers and Reputation Hijackers

If you're looking for a new job, or have a job and don't want to lose it, you need to make sure your SEO REP is in good shape. This applies basically to, well, everybody. We're all vulnerable to having our Search Engine Optimized (SEO) Reputation mangled and maligned by jealous co-workers and competitors, angry exes, crazy customers and a whole slew of online whack-jobs who get kicks out of planting nastiness in the first few pages of people's search results.

You know that whenever you apply for a job or go into an interview, the person sitting across from you has probably done a Google, Google+ and Facebook search, possibly even a Twitter. So you want whatever comes up to be positive, factual, supportive and especially advantageous to your job search.

So what can you do to maintain your "web credibility"? There are professional services that can help establish and claim web property related to your name and syndicate the biographical or business information that you provide, but there's a price. You can also do it yourself, but it takes time that you might not have. So if you feel protecting your reputation is worth a lot more than what you might have to pay one of the services designed to do just that, it may be worth it.

What these services typically do is to make sure any site that contains factual information is ranking well or high up in the big search engines such as: MSN/BING, Google and Yahoo. Some of the services that came up in a Google search include Reputation.com, ReputationDefender.com, Defendmyname.com and Seofriendly.com.

In this world of anonymous postings, you need to be taking some kind of action, even if all you do is open an account with Google or Yahoo and create some alerts. These alerts should send you an e-mail whenever somebody puts up a new site, posts something about you that includes the keywords that you have created or if these key words appear just about anywhere on the web subject to search.

To be really safe, talk to an SEO expert who has been in the business for a few years and decide if you should begin an active strategy to protect your name, brand and career. Getting that new job may just depend on it.