Reverse SEO is becoming more important as people become more search engine savvy. Fifteen years ago, it took quite an effort for companies and people to get listed on search engines. Nowadays, you can't put up a single website, blog post, photo, or tweet that doesn't get picked up by any of the major search engines.

This means your photos of you and your friends at Spring Break can be found online. So can your rated-R jokes on Facebook. And your angry tweets to a political opponent. All of this shows up when people are searching for you on their search engine of choice. While you can hope that your negative content won't show up on a random search, this is one of those things that will come back and bite you when you most needed it to stay hidden.

This is especially annoying, because businesses fight and struggle to get their content to show up first in the search engine results, and yet that one photo someone else took is the one that will haunt you forever. Your friends posted it to Facebook, commented on it, linked to it on Twitter, and told all their friends about it. There it is for the world to see whenever they search for your name. You need reverse SEO in the worst way.

Why you need reverse SEO

Reverse SEO is a way to hide any negative content, which  you do not want people to see when they are looking for you online.  Reverse SEO pushes down negative information within search engine results.  It's something that not only businesses should practice, but individuals as well. Businesses are always worried about negative reviews, negative comments in blogs, or even negative blog posts themselves; people should be worried as well. 

But reverse SEO isn't just for businesses. People have to practice their own online reputation management, and learn how to do basic reverse SEO if they ever find themselves in a situation where unwanted information has made its way to the top of the search engine results.  This could be during a job search, a potential freelance client looking to hire you, an event organizer who wants to talk to you about a speaking opportunity, or even if you ever ran for public office.

Reverse SEO won't get rid of negative content, unfortunately. But by practicing reverse SEO — purposely putting positive content at the top of the search results — you can push the negative content off the front page, and eventually down below hundreds and even thousands of positive search results.  89% of search results activity comes from the first page of search results.  What is listed on the first page, when people search your name in Google?

To do reverse SEO for a job search, try a few of these techniques:

1. Start a blog. Blogging is very important in reverse SEO, because not only are you putting your best thoughts and ideas out for others to see, you're showing hiring managers your thought processes and how knowledgeable you are. Search engines love blogs, because content is being continually refreshed, so the more content you produce, the higher you rise up the search engine rankings.
2. Create videos. Videos are great for reverse SEO, because they pop up near the top of the search results anyway. And if you're job hunting or expanding your public speaking career, you may want to consider posting videos, showing you speaking at industry events. Consider it a video résumé you give to event organizers and hiring managers.
3. Participate positively on Facebook and Twitter. Since it's probably Facebook or Twitter that got you into trouble, you need to get rid of the stuff that created the problem, and then start filling these networks with things that positively affect your reputation. While deleting the photos or tweets won't get rid of the problem completely, they're harder to find, which will also help your reverse SEO efforts.
4. Alter your name. No, we don't mean change it. But if you use a shortened name (Chris instead of Christopher), consider using your full name and/or your middle name in a professional setting. Put all of your professional content out there under your full name, and then use that on your résumé. While this won't hide your negative content, it gives you some indirect reverse SEO, because people will look for your professional name instead. This will buy you some time while you do other reverse SEO techniques on your "old" name.