Do You Know Your Online Id?

Have you Googled yourself recently? It’s not a bad idea to do this from time to time remembering that others are probably doing it and quite possibly making decisions based on the outcome.

Prospective employers, clients and others thinking about forming some sort of relationship with you, or just the plain old curious, will do a Google on you. Why?

• To check on claims that you have made
• To make sure that there are no negative indications

• To find, and check, your blog or web site

So, you should be checking your “Google-Index” on a reasonably regular basis.

What you find might surprise you.

For example, just last week I checked the online identity of three clients. The first yielded a link to his business web site as the first result.

The second, did not return any relevant hits on any of the first five Google results! This was a concern as it was highly likely that his potential clients would do this search and be disapointed.

The third case was interesting. My client was surprised to find himself on the first page of Google results. However, the overall results gave no indication that he is a widely published technical author in his consultancy field.

Ok, so what?

There is a way to control your online identity. It’s very new (still in beta) and may or may not survive the test of time. However, it does work so I thought it would be a good idea to write about it.

The service is called claimID

You can see it in action by clicking on my hCard badge in the righthand sidebar on this page.