Google is Your Permanent Record

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This post will go on (W)right On's permanent record.

And so will just about anything you, your employees, friends, enemies, and family post to MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Del.i.cious, etc.

Critical, unfavorable or downright bad search engine results that appear in your top 10 Google returns can easily become a stain on your record.

There are ways to manipulate search engine results so that favorable items recieve higher rankings, eventually relegating undesirable results, which are often inaccurate or really old news, to the second page of results.

While your online marketing team and SEO experts work hard to move your site up to #1 in the rankings for your category, be sure you have an online PR team working just as hard to keep the other nine results aligned with your desired image and pushing that cheapshot blog post to #11 or higher. (If after reading this, you're unconvinced of the power of 11, please be sure to watch the video primer that follows below.)

Google is essentially your company's home page and first impression. But there's also now a web project called the Internet Archive and, if Google is your permanent record, Internet Archive is your high school yearbook.

Thought you took down that embarassing webpost or terrible first attempt at a website? Think again and surf over to the Internet Archive: you'll find it there in all its former glory. While this can be painful, it can also be an excellent tool for research if you are looking for an old news release or other data that is no longer cached in the Google results. But it could just as easily be a liability to an organization that thought it had rid itself of a bio from a bad hire, content that it was sued over, or similar material. The bottomline is your overall online reputation is more important than a fleeting TV news story or traditional print coverage, except where that material is indexed by the search engines and becomes a part of your online image.

In the event that you've found this post a bit heavy, we will leave you with this excellent primer on the benefits and advantages of eleven, which is not simply restricted to unwanted search engine results but is also a great asset to amplification technology.