As a professional land surveyor, your next job may depend on the comments and ratings posted online by previous customers. So,before you can manage your online reputation, you have to assess it. Type your names in search engines. Set up search alerts for your company name or your name (Google recently made this easier to do from the Google dashboard through a new “Me on the Web” tool).

If you find something that might be questionable, ask yourself the following:

• Did I post it? If, for instance, photos from your Flickr account that you’d rather keep private are showing up in search results for your name, you could just simply delete the photos or adjust your privacy settings.

  After you’ve removed the offensive content, you can use Google’s URL removal tool to stop it from appearing as a cached copy or snippet in search results. If you do nothing, the content will still eventually drop from Google’s index — it will just take a bit longer to disappear.

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• Is it personal information that could be used in a crime? If someone posts your social security number, bank account number, credit card number or an image of your handwritten signature, these days Google will make efforts to remove it from search results. It will also contact the site’s hosting company to request that the page be taken down.
• Is it posted on a high-traffic news site? Competing for search results with a popular news site is very difficult. But Patrick Ambron, the cofounder of a personal online reputation management service called Brand-Yourself, says that all hope is not lost. “Google usually only likes to rank one result per domain name per page,” he says. “So if you could get another result on the same domain name like St. Croix Land Surveyor that was better optimized for your name, you could theoretically knock the bad article off.” One way to do this is to create a profile on that news site using your full name. Use as many links as possible, and link to the profile from all of your other web properties.  Another way is to use your Land Surveyors United profile!  Post updates through our status update feature and load your profile up with tons of relevant info and links to past projects.  Chances are, our network will outrank any site that might say something negative about you. You can kill the negative with positive contributions to the network.

If you can’t answer “yes” to either of these questions, your best bet for reducing the visibility of negative content is to compete for top search results using positive content.  Posting regular contributions to this network will surely go a long way in this battle.