It’s a morning ritual, where a few people are walking or running down the beach, the bulldozers are cleansing the sand, erasing all trials of the previous day. Cleansing your internet prints is hardly possible, after a day of surfing they are all over the web world and there is no way to erase them.

Some companies leave their print, some others prevent that employee's prints are discovered on the web, and probably another category is not aware that they leave prints or not.

There is no best practice on this one. There are financial companies, of which you might expect that they would avoid any compromise on integrity, but experience shows that some financials hide their identity on the net, others are proud of showing it.

The same is true for the search engines, I’ve never seen a Google footprint other than the well known web robots. This means -- if in fact Google Hides their identity on the web -- that the policy at Google is "not to exhibit its identity." At least one other search engine does leave footprints. But where Google is the most important search engine, the best practice is not to leave footprints.

Why do some companies choose to show their identity? From the information I've gathered from our site (statistics), there is no real policy to distillate. There are companies:

* like the previous mentioned financials that either hide or show their origin.
* like consulting companies that show their ID. In this case you could imagine that this is a sort of free advertising.
* universities and governmental institutions are the group that nearly all show their ID. This is probably not because they want it, but a budget issue. Universities host their own applications because they are often required to do their investigation. Especially technology centers.
* service providers. They also leave footprint because of the same commercial reason.

What’s in this for you? I think that the largest search engine is right in not showing an identity. That is therefore the best practice. Commercial benefits from showing your company name on the net are minor; it is probably like the small investor who is trading on a daily bases and gaining a small amount of money. Until that time where he is too late to sell and looses all the money previously acquired or even much more. Larger companies -- other than universities and service providers -- do not benefit from this practice.