America In Transition: Ashley Madison Names: Reputation Management Crisis Waiting to Happen #JimAndAnn

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Ashley Madison Names: Reputation Management Crisis Waiting to Happen #JimAndAnn

A couple of weeks ago the whole database of Ashley Madison, the well-known cheating website, got hacked and lots of its users’ personal data became public.

Whether you were active on the site or just registered out of curiosity, your name may be in that database and that means it will now be published online in various forms and publications.

It’s only the matter of time, how soon one of these web pages with your name on it will rank in top 20 in Google search results for your name which may hurt your career and personal life.

Nowadays everyone googles everyone: You google your future date, CEOs google their potential employees. Its hard to tell what the reaction would be when anyone finds out you were in any way connected to Ashley Madison. That becomes especially tricky if you are into teaching, military, politics, etc.

Jim Boykin and Ann Smarty are discussing how you should be pro-active in managing your Google search reputation instead of waiting until the disaster happens:

Takeaways:

It’s not a good strategy to hope this won’t affect you. The database is public for ever: If your name is there, you are most likely to see your name ranking for an Ashley-Madison-related result one day.
It’s much easier to prevent the disaster than deal with it. Once any of the Ashley-Madison-related page starts ranking for your name, it’s much harder to get rid of it (pages in top 10 of Google become stronger because people start linking to them)
You can start yourself by registering social media accounts for your name to populate your top 10 with the results you can control:
- Use Knowem to discover more places where you can register your account
- Use exact match usernames (your username should be exactly as your name)
- Enable custom URLs where possible (those help your profiles rank)
- Interlink your social media profiles as much as possible (Backlinks help web pages rank higher)
- Maintain your accounts for them to be active: Google won’t rank abandoned social media accounts with no activity
In many cases, registering social media accounts won’t be enough though. If your story gets into the news or if reputation crisis may effect your company, it’s a smart decision to use online reputation management service. Internet Marketing Ninjas have huge experience in raking care of tough reputation management cases: And it’s a hard work too!