You’ve probably read some of the stories about teens putting embarrassing pictures or postings on their Facebook pages. Those indiscretions can come back to haunt them in any number of ways. Smart parents explain this to their kids and the potential problems on personal web pages are hopefully edited and/or deleted.
Does that fix the problem? Maybe … and maybe not. Here’s why – the content out on the web is like the content on a PC or a LAN. It is stored, cached and backed up in case something happens to the original content. The same thing happens with the trillions of links that search engines catalog. A vast system like Google does not take note of every addition, deletion or change made on the Internet every day.
Links to “old” or backed up web pages come up on searches all the time. A perfect example came up at my work. Our receptionist was getting calls concerning products made by a division of our company that had been sold off over 2 years previously. A little detective work showed that some of the search results for the products were returning web pages that existed before the division was sold. The phone number was accurate when the web page was part of our web site. Even though the page is no longer part of our web site, we still get calls based on the old link and backed up web page.
So be careful! Be extremely careful about what you post and fix any errors as quickly as possible. Try to keep the “bad” content from haunting you forever.
