There's a question I get asked, in some version, by almost everyone I meet who's rebuilt anything after a public fall:
What do I do about Google?
I get it. The Google search is the thing that decides whether the conversation you're trying to have today gets to happen, or whether it gets quietly cancelled before you even know it was being considered.
We don't really have language for this yet. We've had public records for a long time — court records, professional registers, news archives. What we haven't had until recently is a single, free, instant, universally-used tool that aggregates all of them and surfaces them on demand, forever, to anyone curious enough to type your name.
The implications of that are still working themselves out. And I want to write honestly about what I've learned from inside it, because most of the advice on this topic is bad.
The bad advice
The standard advice is: build a strong online presence to push the negative results down. Generate positive content. Optimise your LinkedIn. Write articles. Start a podcast. Bury the past with volume.
That advice isn't wrong, exactly. The mechanics work. If you produce enough content, the bad results do move further down the page. Page two of Google might as well not exist for most purposes.
But the strategy treats your past like an SEO problem, which is the wrong frame. The past isn't an SEO problem. It's an integration problem.
If your strategy is just to outrank the past, you're still in a relationship with the past where it's the thing you're hiding from. You're just hiding from it with better tools. The work you're doing — the LinkedIn articles, the podcast, the positive content — becomes camouflage rather than contribution. It doesn't grow you. It just covers you.
That's exhausting. And it doesn't actually heal anything.
What I've done instead
I've made a different choice, and I want to be honest that it's a more uncomfortable one.
I write about it. Publicly. With my name on it. I host a podcast called Fall From Grace. I have written this blog post you're reading, on a website with my own name as the URL.
The strategy isn't to outrank the past. The strategy is to be more present than the past.
When someone Googles me, the ASIC ban is still there. The bankruptcy is still there. But so is the podcast, so is this site, so is the work I'm doing now, so is the lived-experience commentary I'm contributing to the recovery and AI sectors. The full picture is available, including the parts I'd rather not advertise.
That works for me for a specific reason. The work I do now — counselling study, recovery content, lived-experience consulting — is work where the past is relevant. It's not a contradiction. It's not even a complication. It's part of the qualification, in the way I wrote about in a different post.
If I were trying to rebuild a career in financial services, this strategy wouldn't work. The past would directly disqualify me from the field. I'd have to make different choices. Probably a career pivot, definitely a posture of "this is no longer the field I work in, here's where I work now, here's why".
The right strategy depends on where you're trying to land.
The harder question
The harder question, underneath all the SEO talk, is this: are you trying to outrun the past or integrate it?
If you're trying to outrun it, you'll be running for the rest of your career. Search engines are patient. Archives are patient. The thing you're running from doesn't get tired.
If you're integrating it, you're doing different work. You're building a present that the past makes sense inside, rather than building a present designed to obscure the past. Those are different projects.
Integration is harder upfront and easier long-term. Outrunning is easier upfront and exhausting long-term.
I'm not arguing everyone should choose integration. There are contexts where it's not safe — domestic violence survivors using old names, people in industries with no tolerance for the specific history, contexts where the disclosure would put a current job or relationship at risk. Those are real considerations.
But for most people I talk to about this — people who've had a public professional fall and are wondering what to do with the search results — the deeper question isn't how do I make this go away. It's who do I want to be in relation to this.
The search results aren't going anywhere. You are. The question is in which direction.
Tony Bailey is in recovery, studying counselling at Torrens University, and hosts the podcast Fall From Grace.