Startup Blog

Who's Google think you are? What's your online reputation? Who is Mike Volpe, really?

Posted by Mike Volpe on 2/4/08 3:34 PM

My name is Mike Volpe.  I own www.MikeVolpe.com - I bought the domain in 2000.  Why?  It was clear at that time that the Internet was going to be the future of business and of society, and owning your own name was a good thing.

Today, if you search in Google for "Mike Volpe", my website is listed as the first result, and 4 of the 10 results on the first page have something to do with me.  But, perhaps as a surprise to some people, "Mike Volpe" is a pretty common name.  In fact, there are 121,000 search results in Google for Mike Volpe, including a guy who is apparently a somewhat famous musician.  So, even with all this competition from the other Mike Volpe's, I am still able to be very easily found by people who want to find me - including old friends and business connections.

3 Tips to Manage Your Online Reputation

  1. Buy your name as a .com.  If it is available, make sure to buy yourname.com.  Right when I got married and my wife confirmed she was going to change her name, I bought two versions of her new name.  Buying a domain is only about $10 per year.  I would not recommend as much other domain extensions (like .net or .org or .name) because people just don't type them in.
  2. Create some content on your website.  Put up a simple website with at least a few pages of content - making sure all the pages are on extensions of the URL you bought. The search engines love original content, no matter what it is, so write a bio about yourself, stories about things you like, whatever.  Just get some content up there associated with your name.
  3. Create other content.  You should have profiles on networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, and have content when appropriate on places like YouTube and Flickr (the musician Mike Volpe should have lots of videos on YouTube, for instance - a photographer should have lots of photos on Flickr, etc.)  This content tends to show up in search results (my LinkedIn profile is one the first page of Google, as are blog articles I have written).

Why Managing Your Online Reputation is Important

  1. It is better to be found than not found.  While we all sometimes like a degree of privacy, if someone is looking for you, I think it is better if they can find you than not.  it will help you reconnect with people, find jobs and other opportunities and generally increase your reputation.  I would NOT post my home number of address, but having a form where people can email you is a good idea.
  2. A strong web presence for you personally is like having a strong professional reputation.  More and more, what you are in the eyes of Google is what you are in the eyes of people.  Especially for someone like me, who works in Internet marketing, if you search for me and can't find me, that really calls my expertise into question.  But increasingly, I think the same is true even if you are a teacher or masseuse.
  3. If someone wants to say something bad about you, you can make that content harder to find.  The more content about you on the web, the less likely it is that someone will be able to find potentially bad things about you.  I recently was talking to a friend who had some unflattering things said about them on a blog - generally untrue, by the way - and they asked how they could make it so that when people searched for her name, other people would not see that article.  The only way is to create more content about yourself that ranks higher than the bad stuff, so that people don't find it.
Mike Volpe

Written by Mike Volpe

Mike Volpe is a startup advisor and angel investor based in Boston.

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