Let's face it - we've all done it.
We've all been curious or bored enough to type our names into Google to see what comes up.
You've probably searched some of your friends or someone you were dating to see the results.
For most of us this is harmless and can sometimes be funny.
For some the results are damaging, especially when potential employers are looking at more than your resume to hire you.
A picture from your college days shows you doing a keg stand in only your underwear, or a Facebook post talks about how wasted you were at the office Christmas party - things you don't want people outside of your group of friends to know.
This is where Googling yourself leads to un-Googling yourself, and here are some important ways to do it.
Examine Your Search Results If you haven't already done so and are just being pre-emptive, type your name in quotations into a search engine.
Closely examine the results and determine what you want removed.
What may look OK on first click could be a few clicks away from something not so good.
Although one picture may be harmless, the other pictures in that album may not be.
Make a note of the sites you want to disassociate from.
Check Your Friends A good portion of the questionable content about you will be on friends' social media profiles or websites they own.
They are likely the easiest to talk to about removing content, such as those embarrassing wedding photos.
Ask them nicely to remove the pictures - or at least remove your name from the caption or description of the unfortunate incident.
With websites such as Flickr, Picasaweb and Facebook that have photo albums where you can tag people, it is also possible to un-tag yourself from the photo without permission from the owner of the album.
Facebook even gives you the option to make yourself un-taggable altogether.
Review all the pictures you are tagged in, as these are linked to your Facebook profile and easily searchable if you haven't taken the right steps to ensure your privacy.
Adjust Social Media Settings If you feel some of those pictures are too funny to remove yourself from, you can make them visible only to a select group of people such as friends or those in your network.
In Facebook, you can click on the settings tab in the top right, then choose privacy settings and adjust a number of parameters, such as who can see your full profile with photos or summary profile only, for example.
Check out all the privacy options for all the social media sites you use.
Adding Robots.
txt If you host embarrassing websites that you don't want anyone (including Google) to know about it, just add the following text in the top folder of your web server: User-agent: * Disallow: / This stops search engines from indexing the content anymore.
The website may still be stored in its cache, so submit a request for removal form to get rid of it completely.
Name Usage To prevent future questionable search engine results, don't use your full name when commenting on a blog or in a public forum - just your first name and last initial.
It is harder to tell who John S.
is than John William Smith.
For full anonymity, use screen names that are common phrases such as Type Master or Mighty Mouse; anything that when typed into a search engine will result in obscure results that won't trace back to you.
Boost the Good Results If you can control or influence the content of websites that have positive things to say about you, spend some time and optimize these pages for search engines.
Ensure your full name appears in the title tag and throughout the content.
This should improve your rankings, and push the negative stuff that you can't control further down in the results - hopefully to page 2 or 3.
Prevention is the Key Use common sense.
If you are worried about compromising pictures of you on the web, don't put yourself in compromising positions.
These days people can tweet and /or post photos to Facebook directly from their cell phones, launching you to instant fame.