Getting your home page to the top of the search results used to be the pinnacle of search engine success. But now that online reputation management is increasingly important, it's essential to cultivate multiple top listings.

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Creating a secure online identity profile usually requires at least 10 or 20 pages that rank for your name. It takes effort to build, groom and strengthen all these pages – but the security they will provide is worth it.

Don't Make Too Many Profiles

Each type of search result (profile page, press release, blog post, etc.) has its own signature look, so even to the untrained eye, too many user-generated social profiles on the first page look unnatural. It looks even worse if the profiles all say something similar or they have phony sounding self-praise in the description.

Camouflage Through Diversity

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image credit: Martin Heigan

Google deliberately avoids showing too many listings from one domain or "flavor," and it usually shows a wide variety of sites and opinions so that users can find what they want quickly.

Cultivate a natural look for your brand in the search results by strengthening the positive and neutral results that already exist naturally. Get some links to the university alumni news bulletin that mentions you. Make some profiles that point to the blog by the Australian guy with the same name. Or take that non-competing company with a similar name on page 2, and put it in the Yahoo! directory.

Diverse listings look natural. The diversity will draw people's eyes to the pages that are obviously about you - where profile overload can encourage them to dig deeper back into the search results and uncover the "dirt."

When negative publicity stings, it's tempting to try and "force" bad results away by overloading. But remember: Google doesn't want you to build links or throw up dozens of new listings overnight. It treats quick changes with suspicion.

So be patient. And don't botch your online reputation by rushing.

Building Quality Profiles and Finding Links for Them

Social media sites let you create pages and links on relatively strong domains. Occasionally domains fall out of Google's favor and popular link sources get "nofollowed," but new dozens of new social sites and services are launched every day. Find them and use them to gracefully build out the foundation of your online identity portfolio.

Lots of thin, spammy profiles won't get you far. Instead, build a few profiles up with real content (blog posts, photos, friends, unique and valuable information) that will make them interesting enough to link to. Your Flickr "Pro" profile can be filled with incredible, rare travel photos. An Amazon profile can contain a substantial review of a new product that bloggers and shopping comparison sites will reference. Your company Del.icio.us profile can be developed into an up-to-date, "creme de la creme" link resource for your industry.

It's not easy to get quality links for personal and profile pages, but every page has a natural link partner somewhere out there on the internet. With some creativity and elbow-grease, you can make your profiles content-rich and compelling enough to get the internal and external links that will help them float to the top of the search results and stay there.

Then you'll have some control over the first page, and random user-generated comments and content is much more likely to show up on the second or third.