My Story
The reason I decided to start this blog is because I know first hand what it is like to experience online reputation that gets out of hand. At the worst point I had a forum dedicated to continue hate about me, hurtful messages through facebook and email, and even a few phone calls in the middle of the night.
My real name is Alexander Tsatkin and today I am not ashamed to have you search for my name online because the episode which I am about to describe is buried so far deep within the internet world that only people who know the details would ever be able to uncover it.
How did it all start? What was the thing that got me in so much trouble? More importantly, how did I manage to control my online reputation?
It all started with a company happy hour. As always I take full advantage of company tab so I guess you can say I was getting pretty tipsy. I was feeling good when I noticed there was a woman talking to some of our co-workers and then taking them into the other room in groups of two or three. Now I know what your thinking, but get your mind out of the gutter for a moment.
I was probably thinking the same thing that you were so I decided to investigate. I found out that it was a reporter who wanted to interview some people for a quick piece she was doing for a Magazine.
I thought to myself, “Oh man how cool would it be to get published!” So I decided to partake in the interview process with the next group.
We were led to a quite area of the bar where we were showed a certain advertisement about women’s products. We were asked what we thought of it. To my left older married gentleman with children, so as you can tell his answer was boring. To my right a odd little man who probably was excited to be speaking to a real life woman. His answer too fell in the mundane bin.
I could see the reporter wanted something worth writing about, and I thought maybe I should be the one to give her some great quotes. Maybe it was because I was drunk, or maybe because I wasn’t thinking of the consequences, or maybe I just wanted to get into the magazine, either way I decided to go on a tear and say everything that the guys next to me thought, but did not have the guts to say out loud.
Just so you know after I was done ranting and raving I was shooting the crap with the reporter and realized that it was my Prom Dates Mother, I knew she looked familiar.
Lets fast forward to a month later and show you what an Instant Message from a friend I haven’t talked to in months looked like.
LongLostFriend: “Hey Alex”
Me: “Sup, long time no talk, whats new”
LongLostFriend: “Did you know that your quote is in XXXX magazine?”
Me: “Get the hell out thats awesome”
LongLostFriend: “Yeah, have you read it?”
Me: “No, I had no idea I was published”
LongLostFriend: “Well, maybe you should”
I ran out of my house to buy the magazine. And low and behold there was a bubble with my quote. It was only a few lines, but it was the typical out of context form:
“blah blah blah…. blah blah… blah blah”- Alex Tsatkin, my age, and the college I went to
I thought it was pretty amusing bought a copy of the magazine and figured this would be a great ice breaker. Well I was wrong, way wrong.
It first started with Facebook harassment. Random messages from people I did not know that looked up my school and my name and decided that it was their responsibility to remind me what a jerk I was. At first I tried to defend myself, but then decided to be a jerk and just write nasty things back. That was a bad idea.
Apparently one of the girls that I wrote nasty notes to decided to start a forum. Basically it was a forum discussing what a piece of crap I was and how I did not deserve to reproduce. It got to a point where if you type in my name into Google that forum was the first thing to come up in the search results.
What was I to do? I was still single, what if girls I dated Googled my name? I was about to graduate, what if my employer decided to Google my name? What if my parents decided to Google my name?
And then I started to get mysterious phone calls from numbers I did not recognize. I never picked up those numbers and whoever was on the other line never had the balls to leave a message. To this day I will not know who it was, but if they found my phone number how easy would it be to find my address?
I had to figure out what to do fast, but it was not a fast process to clean up the search results. Through SEO, trial and error, and creativity I was able to push those results down. It took me over a year to fill up search results with enough pages where the forum and the article are no longer easily found.
The things I learned from this experience should be accessible for anyone who wishes to learn how to protect their name. Today is more important than ever to protect your online reputation. You name is your brand and you should take all the care in the world to protect it. I dedicate this blog to helping people, so no one will have to go through what I did. Subscribe via RSS or email to receive posts on tips on how you can create the search results you want either to impress an employer, a potential mate, or anyone else who wishes to search information about you.