Identity theft seems to be on the rise with the explosion of the Social bookmarking sites, so much so, that it is no longer just people whose identities are getting high jacked by spurious online personalities but their websites as well.

The recent episode of Jeremy Schoemaker, Shoemedia and an oddball fan had bought this issue to the forefront. The reality seems to have a much more fearful bite than any of us could have ever imagined, especially as we consider the ease with which identities can be high jacked online. So let us say, hypothetically, you own a website with a certain ranking, it is possible to lose all that ranking and reputation overnight. That is, the reputation of your site can get high jacked, in a matter of moments. Since it has become a whole lot easier for people to high jack the identities of others over the net, it should not be all that difficult to do the same with websites as well. Google seems to have been caught on the back foot with the Shoemaker episode, with rankings all going awry. The reputation of a website can be thrashed by a rival with such ease and this is more often than not done with the help of book marking sites like Twitter. Domain jacking seems to be the flavor of the season, with an everyday event taking place on the net. Since Google seems to have appointed itself as the online Moral guardian, most of the webmasters are left wondering if Google would do anything about this issue. Social Book marking is here to stay, there is no arguing that. But could it be regulated, that is, could the respective identities as well as the website/domain ownership be verified before registering them at any of the social book marking sites? Well, so far, Google has kept mum….

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