[Crito]

I have a friend who has the dubious honor of sharing a name with a convicted murderer who was executed in Texas a few years ago.

I asked him about how he thinks that has effected him. His take is that although it might turn off some brain-dead HR people, since there is no actual ambiguity (he surely is not an executed person) it hasn't negatively impacted him too much but it does push all the relevant links off the first few google results pages unless he actively does SEO stuff to correct it. He asserts that it gives him a good deal of control over what google shows for his name.

I've taken a similar approach to online pseudonyms. Any work that I don't intend to be attached to my 'meatspace' identity is done under names that will return irrelevant results when googled, making it difficult to find my other accounts that may have the same pseudonym on other sites.