Stalk Yourself: Know Your Web Presence

No, really. If you haven’t already, take a look at what comes up when you Google yourself.

I happen to have an incredibly unique name (thanks, mom and dad!) and when I search for myself, I pop right up. The first time I googled myself, I found articles from high school and, horror of horrors, my old MySpace page. Turns out that I used an AOL email account from the stone age for MySpace, so it’s been quite the process to delete that profile.

My point is: you should be aware of what’s out there when someone googles you. You can actually control what people find to a certain degree. Here’s a beginner’s guide:

1. Google yourself and look at the first handful of pages – don’t stop on the first page!
2. Clean up the results:
   • Pintrest has a setting to hide your profile from search engines. Make sure that’s enabled if you don’t want it to show up!
   • Etsy has a privacy setting that hides your email address, which may be what’s causing it to pop in your search results.
   • Myspace has a handy page for those of us who should have deleted that account ten years ago and didn’t.
   • Facebook check-up: Privacy Settings > Who can see my stuff? > View as “Public” and see what’s visible. Adjust as needed!
3. Make (and maintain) a LinkedIn account.
   • Can you remember the last time you logged in? Is your profile complete? If you answered “no,” to either of those questions, check this infographic out.
4. Set up an alert or set a calendar reminder: check in on your web presence regularly.