The Last Word On Nothing

A few years back, when anyone Googled me, they were directed to a bunch of (and I apologize but there is just no nice way to say this, though those nice British editors at New Scientist tried) piss fetish sites. This had nothing to do with my predilections, which I must hasten to add don’t venture in that direction. So how did this happen? Crowd in, boys and girls: this turns out to be a story about search engine optimization.

Back in 2003, I engaged in an all-too-detailed email correspondence about the office “seat sprinkler” and the increasingly desperate attempts of a counter-sprinkling vigilante. (N.B.: ladies room vigilantism = rhyming “sweetie” with “seatie.”) My partner in the email exchange thought it was funny enough to forward to a friend who ran an irreverent web site. This was years before anyone was writing jeremiads about the longevity of information on the Internet.

Four years later, I finally reaped the whirlwind of an internet presence left too long to its own devices. Long after the lights had gone dark at the place that hosted the original content, the email exchange lived on, in a wholly different context.

But the question that baffled me was this: why was this long-dead content all over the first page of my Google results? How did it even get onto a single fetish site, never mind multiples? And really, Google had no interest in my citations on academic papers or in those college theater productions? Those fetish sites were seriously the most compelling way I could be represented on the entire internet?

I asked a search engine optimization expert to help me find answers. Judith Lewis, head of search at Beyond, a brand reputation tracking firm based in London, reconstructed the chain of events for me. After the original content hit the internet, Google immediately stowed it in its cache, just as it does all content–caching is the reason everything you put on the internet lives forever. After the original web site went offline when its owners lost interest, Google’s cache still contained the full story.

Next came aggregator web sites, which crib content they deem relevant based on select keywords. These sites send out software known as crawlers (programs that look for mentions of the select keywords) to retrieve any content that fits the bill and basically paste it onto their site. There are many aggregator sites, the most high-profile of which gather marketing data based on your shopping habits. They also trawl the Google cache, which is where Lewis suspects they found my email exchanges. Then several other fetish sites re-plagiarized the original enterprising fetish site. With enough of those fetish sites linking to each other, Google became convinced that these sites were important–certainly more important than the worthy little academic paper. (SEO types refer to these kinds of linking strategies as “Google juice.”) That’s how these sites became the most relevant search results for my name.

That’s how reputation works online. It’s all about the most powerful sites that carry your name. And power = links.

I got an especially bad walloping, but actually, everyone will soon need to start paying attention to their online presence. In last week’s issue of New Scientist, I explained why. The main reason is a phenomenon called context collapse, which is what happens when you use the same social networking platform to build your professional identity and post drunken pictures of yourself at concerts. Some people’s lifestyle can survive context collapse, but for most, when colleagues and drinking buddies are sardined into the same social networking pen–especially one as fickle about privacy rules as Facebook–someone ends up with a black eye.

So look, the chances that you will end up on a fetish site are pretty slim. But all kinds of minor annoyances can cause major headaches if they’re left to themselves. For example, do you have a Googleganger–same name, very different person? Do you have a few different resumes out there from different eras of your life? Headhunter-type aggregators will stitch those together into a human centipede of misinformation. The point is, all the information floating around the internet about all of us is unregulated and subject to no quality control, including from ourselves.

There are a lot of SEO tricks that will allow you to gain control of that first page of Google results, and I document them in New Scientist with a handy flow-chart.

What I didn’t get into in that article is how much it bothers me that we’re on the cusp of an era of personal brand management. You just can’t opt out–at least, not if you want a job or a date. “It’s an expectation at this point,” Lewis told me. When she’s hiring, she says, “I’m looking for a LinkedIn profile, a personal site, and a variety of social media footprints. If they don’t have that, they don’t get the job. They don’t even get the interview.”

And once you’ve set up your online footprints, you’re enslaved to them quickly, as they require constant care and feeding. “That LinkedIn account that still shows you at the place you worked 6 years ago?” Lewis says. “That makes you look unprofessional.”

Of course, the last refuge of the can’t-be-arsed is money. Reputation.com, as its name suggests, manages your online reputation for a monthly fee. Or for DIY people, there’s Socio Clean, which will give you the scoop on just how dangerous your Facebook profile is to your healthy reputation.

But even as there are better ways to control your online representation, I’m disappointed by this sea change in identity on the internet. Our favorite audience right now seems to be employers, so everything needs to be scrubbed for the employer’s eye. Didn’t the internet used to be where we could go to escape that kind of thing? Wasn’t the internet supposed to be a freewheeling place where we could all reinvent ourselves?

I am curious to see whether this business-driven environment lasts. Is it a temporary detour in the formation of the internet and internet culture, or is this the fork in the road that determines future direction? What would either of those mean for you?

Sally Adee writes about applied physics in all its glory, including space technology, brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, and the interesting ways technology and humanity are starting to interact. A former associate editor at IEEE Spectrum, she is now a technology features editor at New Scientist.

Photo Credits: courtesy of cryptdang and Agent of Darkness