Keep your online profile in check, you never know who’s looking

The pictures of your buddy’s beer can tower or your Catwoman costume from last Halloween may seem harmless, but what if a potential employer stumbled upon them?

Increasingly, recruiters and employers are using the Internet to investigate potential new hires. According to an ExecuNet survey, 75% of recruiters use search engines to uncover information about candidates, and 26% said they’ve eliminated candidates because of information found online.

Here are some tips from CollegeJournal.com to help clean up your “digital dirt”:

Google yourself

If you’ve never Googled yourself, now is the time. Enter your name in quotes and start your search. You will know what's out there, and as they say, knowing is half the battle. If something pops up that you don’t want the world to see, contact the site administrator and ask them to remove it. This doesn’t always work but it is certainly worth a try.

Clean up your Facebook

Recruiters have been known to look up candidates on sites such as MySpace and Facebook. A good rule of thumb is that if you wouldn't want your mother to see it, don't put it on your profile. If you want to keep your unprofessional profile the way it is, set a restrictive privacy policy on your account that only lets confirmed friends see your profile. But remember that you profile photo is visible even to those who are non-friends, so use something that won’t raise any red flags.

Bury your dirt

This process is more involved, but the idea is that if you flood the Internet with positive information about yourself, it’s harder for others to find the not-so-flattering stuff. Search engines rank results based on the number of links pointing to the site. So, if you can figure out how to get a bunch of Web sites to link to your Eagle Scout award, you're golden. One method is to start a blog or personal Web site and load it up with all of your professional successes and accomplishments.

Monitor your blog buzz

Find out what others are posting about you online. You can monitor what your friends and enemies are saying about you by subscribing to services like Google Alerts that will alert you by e-mail whenever your name is mentioned on the Web.

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