How to Repair your Online Reputation

Your reputation online is as important as your reputation amongst your peers, particularly when you are searching for a new job, where the likelihood is that your prospective employer will carry out a search of your name. If adverse search results appear in a search of your name, it may well affect your ability to find a new or better job.

It is therefore of the utmost importance to ensure that your online reputation is as good as it possibly can be.

One of the ways in which this can be achieved, is by making an application for the right to be forgotten to search engines, if there are any results which appear in a search of your name that you would prefer were not there.

Applications to Google and other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing, can be drafted and submitted very quickly and often we will have results within days or weeks, rather than having to wait months or years, as would be the case if you were using the court process.

The European Court of Justice has stated that search engines should block unwanted results if the information contained within the URLs is irrelevant, outdated, or otherwise inappropriate. These are fairly wide criteria and therefore if a news story has been published many years previously, or if the information it reports is no longer relevant, or if there is another good reason why the material should be removed (such as it refers to your sensitive personal data) the application to the search engine should be successful.

A successful application to a search engine does not mean that the underlying material is removed. However, it does mean that if somebody searches your name, the material would no longer appear in the results. If your ultimate aim is to remove the underlying documentation (such as an old newspaper report, or old publications on social media) this can be more time consuming and costly. However, we can assist you with fixed fee services for various types of work.

For example, we can write to each of the individual publishers who are publishing the material about you, seeking their agreement to removal. Some publishers (such as smaller independent newspapers) tend to be more amenable to this type of request.

In other cases, it may be necessary to make an application to the court for an injunction which can be more costly and time consuming, but we can carry out this work for you, again on a fixed fee basis.

If you want to tidy up your online reputation, contact us today to find out how we can help.