In August, I wrote that the future is moving toward us faster than at any other time in history, that the changes we are seeing in communications are evolutionary. The world ahead can potential be one “less of individual strategy than of collective reasoning” as new forms of communications open new pathways for opinions and understanding and empathy and compassion and facts. In the post-cyber age we will have greater opportunities to globally address time-sensitive and relevant social issues.

The extent to which we seize these opportunities has a lot to do with how well we protect ourselves online, and this depends a great deal on how well we control what we share about ourselves and how we deal with what others have shared about us.

In this interview from episode 5 of Brian Solis’ (R)evolution series, Michael Fertik, founder of Reputation Defender speaks about the need for tools that allow users to protect their reputations and privacy and to control their digital profiles. From students applying to colleges to professionals for whom reputation impacts success, the Internet is often a dubious partner. In this interview, Fertik and Solis take a look at our current state of online privacy and discuss ways in which privacy can be engineered and taught moving forward.

Some of the Weejee Media Pages Indexed by Google

The Google footprint for a business can be determined the same way we determine a footprint for an individual: simply type the business name into the search bar. But if the business has a website, there are even more ways to measure its footprint.

The search engines offer advanced operators to help you refine and improve your search and help you research how your site is doing. And they’re easy.

Which Pages of My Site Are Being Indexed?
It’s always good to know which pages of your site the search engines are indexing, or more importantly, which ones they’re not. After all, if a page is not being indexed, it will not come up in any search results. To find out which pages of your site are being indexed, use the “site:” operator.

In a Google search field (not the address bar), type “site:YOURSITE.com” without the quotes and with no spaces, and no “www.” Then press enter/return. You’ll see at the top the total number of pages that have been indexed by Google, and most of those pages will be listed in the results.

Who’s Linking to My Website?
One of the most important factors search engines consider when calculating the relevance of a page is how many other websites link to it. How many websites link to pages on your site? Again, it’s easy to find out.

Go to Yahoo! (not Google), and in the search field, not the address bar, type this:

link:http://www.YOURSITE.com

The results will include pages from elsewhere on the Web that link to pages on your site. The more links you have from reputable sites, particularly sites that are related to yours in some way, the higher the search engines will rank your site.

Website Navigation
If you see that the search engines do not index a lot of your pages, there’s a good chance they’ve never seen them. Good site navigation is not only important to users, it’s important to the search engines as well. Make sure links to all the pages on your site are no more than two clicks away. If possible, create a sitemap and link to it from the footer of each page. Your visitor will love it, and so will the search engines.

How do you measure your footprint online?

http://maps.google.com
Search for anything local, anywhere. What can we say, it’s Google. They’ve combined Maps with Google Local and made a killer local search tool. Type in “pizza” and your city or town. Unless you’re looking for tires.