A short while back the folks at SEO Blackhat published a great post called This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record. You might ask what a self-professed “white hat” such as myself was doing rousting around on the SEO Blackhat blog, but the reality is that I am a fan of the SEO Blackhat blog. They write some great stuff
And so it was, with this post. The point they made was that everything you put online is being archived for all eternity. No matter what you do, no matter how funny you think it may be today, it could come back to haunt you.
The way to deal with this is not to run and hide, but to think twice about it when you are about to put something controversial online. Whenever I am writing an e-mail at someone that has pissed me off, I write a good juicy one, and then I save it as a draft. I wait until I have cooled off from whatever it was that upset me before I go back to it. Sometimes this is the next day. After a nights sleep, a cooler head prevails.
This same logic applies to the juicy photo you are about to upload or the flaming comment you are about to leave on someone’s blog. Someone may see what you did 4 years later, or as SEO Blackhat suggested, maybe it won’t seem like such a good idea to you that you did that when your potential job employer searches on your name and learns all these different things about you that you weren’t prepared to share with them.
The bright light of day will find what you are doing, no matter how small the corner of the web where you are doing it may reside. The web itself is a permanent record. It’s a great idea to participate in it in many ways. Just use sound judgment whenever you are doing something “edgy.”
