With school teachers, employers, and even people you meet randomly in the bar “Googling” you, online reputation management has never been more important. All it takes is a couple uploaded drunken pictures to your MySpace or Facebook to have them rank for your name (provided you aren’t John Smith) and ruin your reputation to everyone who happens to look.

Listen up students and professionals alike: Who is going to hire someone who has all 200 pictures of them in various stages of undress or drunkenness? Not me, that’s for sure. It seems all in good fun at the time but do you really want everyone you ever meet who has heard of “Googling” to know how hard you used to party?

It seems hard at the time to censor your friends from posting pictures of you, but you CAN un-tag yourself. Sure you may come across as a “buzzkill” – but when your future is on the line…

Your past escapades caught on camera can come back to haunt you, just ask billionaire co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin. On the first page of results in Google Images for “sergey brin” is this beauty of a photo:

My prediction in the next few years we will see a boom of “Online Reputation Managers” springing up. Sadly not all of them will be any good and some will take advantage of people who know less about the web.

My best advice would be to protect yourself while you can… And the next time you are thinking about posting that picture of you smoking and drinking… reconsider – or at least use an alias.

And don’t just assume that because your photos are marked “Private” you’re safe. Your friends still have access to these photos and they can leak your photos to public sites. And sites like Facebook aren’t as secure as you might think, when it comes to private photos.