How Long Does It Take To Clean Up My Online Presence?

How Long Does It Take To Clean Up My Online Presence?

It only takes a moment to turn your life upside down--an arrest, a DUI, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time can cause you to experience trouble with your career and personal relationships. Even worse, if information about your misfortune makes it to the internet, it could be broadcast to millions of people in a millisecond. When you see your name being dragged down online, it's natural to want to get started now on cleaning it up. Unfortunately, cleaning up your web presence takes time.

The first decision that you must make that will affect how fast your reputation gets repaired is whether you want to try to fix it yourself or get a free analysis by calling the phone number posted on this page. Either way will be effective, but it stands to reason that a team of dedicated experts can do something quite a bit faster than you can in your spare time.

The method of reputation management you employ will also affect the time it takes to succeed. The two most common methods involve attempting to get erroneous content removed and creating enough positive content to make the negative content get pushed down the search rankings so that it's not the first thing people see when they Google your name. The two methods are quite different in terms of the time they take.

As an example, if a legitimate website posts a picture of someone else drunk at a graduation party and puts your name under it, it should be pretty quick and easy to contact that site manager, point out the mistake and get it removed. If, however, someone maliciously posts your mugshot from an arrest on a hundred websites, it could take quite some time to get it removed—in fact, you might spend months creating enough positive web content to make sure that mugshot gets buried on page 20 when people search for your name.

From the minute your reputation gets damaged, it can cost you jobs, friends, and respect. However you fix it, and whether it takes a few days or a few years, the sooner you start working on it, the sooner the bad publicity goes away.