Reentry Strategies: Online Reputation Management with Drew Chapin

We were honored to host our own Drew Chapin, founder of The Discoverability Company and a member of our group since 2021, as our January 2026 White Collar Support Group Tuesday Night Speaker Series presenter. Drew spent the hour on the problem almost all of us share, which is what a stranger finds after typing your name into Google. You can watch the full recording above.

Drew is not working this one from the outside. At the end of his own 13-month case, page one of his name held almost 200 local news stories, national coverage, social posts and six government press releases. He sat through the demos from the big reputation firms, decided he already knew how to do the work, and rebuilt it himself. Whether your case broke last week or years ago, this is that method.

What can actually be removed from search results

Most of us arrive believing nothing can be removed. Search results are one of the collateral consequences nobody warns you about, and more of it comes off page one inside thirty days, at little or no cost, than anyone expects. Google takes free removal requests for pages carrying personally identifiable information, and that policy reaches further than people assume. It was built for the people-search sites, but a court filing or news story that leaks an address or phone number qualifies on the same grounds.

Court records are the bigger one. Filings are public and that will not change, but the pages ranking for your name usually belong to private research companies, not to the government, and dozens of them run a formal de-indexing process. The filing does not leave the internet. It leaves the search page, which is the part that walks into a job interview with you.

Local news is the hardest of the three and still worth an ask. The right to be forgotten is European law and not ours, so nothing can be forced, but smaller publishers keep quietly adopting their own version of it. Drew’s whole instruction on asking fits in two sentences.

Does not hurt to approach as long as you’re polite and respectful. You explain your situation.

Why a federal press release outranks everything you build

The question most of us have asked in anger is why that one .gov page will not budge. Drew’s answer is that Google behaves like a librarian reaching for the most official looking book on the shelf, and a .gov domain is about as official as a book gets. None of it is aimed at you. Page one is arithmetic and not judgment, which sounds like cold comfort and is actually the opening, because arithmetic can be worked and a verdict cannot.

Two ranking factors deserve a warning, because they are the ones you cannot argue with. Bad news is clickable and people are nosy, so a headline about an arrest earns clicks a marketing consultant’s page never will, and a news story is engineered to hold you once you land on it. Google reads both as quality, so there you are up against human nature rather than an algorithm.

Drew puts the gap in numbers. On the trust score he uses to explain all this, a federal press release sits around 97 out of 100, with hundreds of other pages pointing at it. Whatever you are about to build starts at zero.

How to rebuild page one of your name for $50 a year

And so look, page one contains 10 links. The job that we have is to build 10 links that rank, that matter, that have a ton of authority that Google likes.

That is the whole scope of the work, and it is smaller than it feels at two in the morning. Depending on whose number you trust, better than 90 percent of searches never leave page one.

Drew puts a best practice personal website at roughly fifty dollars a year, and he does not want it fancy. Plain, objective and substantive, closer to an encyclopedia entry than a brochure. On top of that go the free profiles and directories, then whatever you produce yourself. Some of our members have gone public with writing and podcasting, including Tom Hardin.

One instruction stops people mid-mistake. Do not delete your social accounts when a case starts. A ten-year-old LinkedIn profile will always be easier to rank than one you opened this week, and scrubbing costs you the one asset you already own. He is honest that the rebuild runs four to six months, and blunt about anybody selling guaranteed removal.

The smallest suggestion of the night costs nothing and changes one daily habit, in how you open LinkedIn. Worth hearing him say that one out loud.

About Drew Chapin

Drew founded The Discoverability Company, which helps people and businesses build or repair their online footprint. He is a former startup founder and technologist who spent his career on how apps and online stores show up in search, until his own justice journey began five years ago. He has since done this work for dozens of justice-impacted people.