Primarily to protect your personal reputation, which is equally critical to maintaining your business credibility, you may set up search alerts for your brand name. This can be a good idea, and Google has now made it very much simpler through a ‘Me on the Web’ tool from the Google dashboard).
You can use the alert feature you when the desired or relevant information- say, your personal details, business e-mail address or contact number- is published online. You need to sign in to the Dashboard to create personalized alerts.
Next, check in to ‘Set up search alerts for your data’ un ‘Me on the Web’, choose the checkboxes just beside the alerts you want to receive, including optional data like a home address for that particular alert.
You may decide their frequency and the e-mail address to which the alerts should be posted to for immediate intimation. If you come across undesirable material online- say, an embarrassing photograph of you, which you to avoid displaying publicly, visit ‘How to remove unwanted content’ to get directions on deleting such material from the search results of Google.
Providing a backgrounder to its new offering, an official Google blog mentions that it has become rather easier in recent years to publish any sort of data about yourself on the Web, through new platforms like social networks and online photo sharing services.
One way of managing your privacy is to work out who specifically will get to see this piece of information, deciding whether it’s visible to a few friends, family or everyone online. But, another vital decision is choosing how you will be identified once you post that data. Google adds:
“We’ve worked hard to build different identity options into our products. For instance, while you may want to identify yourself by say name when you post a reply to a question in a forum so that others know the response is indeed reputable, if you upload videos about a slightly controversial cause you may prefer to do so under a pseudonym. We have released a tool to help make it more convenient and easier to monitor your online identity and to give easy access to resources denoting ways to control what data is on the web. The tool appears as a section of the Google Dashboard.”
Savvy users might already have utilized Google Alerts for setting up notifications for specific mentions of their personal details in sites, news stories and updates. ‘Me on the Web’ has made it easier.
The tool suggests a few search terms that you can monitor. It gives access to resources on how to control the third-party information posted about yourself online for accessing a site webmaster to take down the content, or publish some additional information to help make less relevant sites appear downwards in relevant search results.
