There are a couple of things you can try to do to remove your name from the search engines, but none of them have any guarantees. The first is to be careful about what you write. If someone publishes something negative about you on the Internet, it could easily get into the public domain and be used by someone who wants to hurt you. The second is to make sure that you keep up with your privacy settings. If someone knows about your personal information, they could use it to hurt you in some way.
- Remove the bad press from your website or blog.
- Get a new domain name and start fresh with a new website.
- Use a search engine optimization (SEO) company to improve your ranking in search engines for the keywords that are associated with the bad press.
- Contact the news outlet that published the bad press and offer to make a correction or apology on their behalf. ..
Method 1 – Contact Site Owner
- Google search the term “WHOIS” and find the website’s contact information.
- Yahoo! search “WHOIS” and find the website’s contact information.
- AOL search “WHOIS” and find the website’s contact information.
Some websites have private registration, which means that you will not see the contact information for a proxy company. You should still send an email as it is usually just forwarded to the site owner.
Method 2 – Contact Hosting Company
If someone is out to get you, it’s best to try and contact the hosting company that hosted the content. I’ve had quite a few hosting companies take down content on my DCMA requests, mostly due to copyright violations. Your name probably won’t be enough for a DCMA request, but if the information that is posted about you is hateful or defaming or slanderous, you can pretty much guarantee that the site is violating the terms of service for that hosting company.
Hosting companies are usually very helpful when it comes to spam or abuse violations. Even if they can’t take down the content, they will usually send a warning email to the site owner about your issue.
If you’re looking to host a website, it’s important to do your research first. You can find out who is hosting your site by reading my previous post. If you’re unlucky and find out the hosting company is sketchy and won’t help you, then you’ll have to skip this step and try another. ..
Method 3 – Get a Court Order
If the content is illegal and you refuse to take it down, your only option other than Method 5 is to contact a lawyer and sue or get a court order to have the content removed. Usually this isn’t as hard or expensive as it sounds. I’ve seen several occasions where the person simply got a lawyer to draft up an official letter of intent to sue if the content was not removed immediately and that was enough to scare the other party into listening. ..
If someone doesn’t respond to your message, you may have to get a court order in order to communicate with them. This could take more time and money than if they were willing to communicate with you in the first place. If the person or hosting company resides in another country, it is much more difficult to get a court order.
Method 4 – Right to be Forgotten
The Right to be Forgotten is a tool that people have in order to ask search engines to remove specific results for searches of their name if the person’s privacy rights outweigh the interests of the content in those search results.
If you want to request a removal from search results, you’ll need to fill out a form that Google provides. However, this isn’t a surefire way to remove whatever you want from the results. Google looks at each request carefully and make the final decision on whether or not to remove it. According to Google, they have only approved about half of all removal requests.
The removal tool will not be effective for items like criminal convictions, malpractice lawsuits, public misconduct, financial scams, etc. ..
Method 5 – Outrank Bad Results
The last step would be to try to bury the bad results as far down in the search results as possible. Most people don’t look past the first page of results when performing searches, but if someone is trying to find information about you specifically, they may go several pages deep. You’ll basically have to create as many good results as you can and hope they show up higher.
There are a couple of websites, services, tools, etc that you can use to accomplish this. First, let’s talk about what you can do yourself.
Ways to Create Good Search Results
If you want to see the most popular results for a name, it’s best to create accounts on all of the social media sites. This will show you where your name is popular and where you should focus your efforts. It’s also worth noting that Google will show the most popular results for a name if you use it in search engine results pages.
Remember that these methods will take weeks or months to actually work. You won’t be able to just create a few profiles and have them suddenly appear on Google! It takes time and patience. Another way to do this is to search other people’s names and see what sites they show up for and then go sign up on those yourself.
The best way to remove your name from search engines is to use paid services that will do it for you for a fee. Most of these services promise to remove your name from the search engines within 4-6 months, but some claim it will take much longer. If you’re looking for an immediate solution, you’re likely looking at a fake service.
Services to Remove Your Name from Search Results
If you’re not happy with the results of your own content marketing efforts, or you’re not seeing the results you hoped for, it might be worth investing in a professional team to help create and publish your content. Professionals have a lot of experience creating high-quality content that can quickly rank in search engines, so this is probably the easiest way to get results. ..
BrandYourself.com is a website that offers a variety of services, including HeadStart, which costs $800 initial and then $20/month to maintain. The HeadStart package includes creation of all your profiles and even custom websites with custom domains. The concierge service is simply $400 a month and includes everything from HeadStart, but also includes monthly creation of new content for you on all the sites.
Reputation.com is a website that will essentially create positive content around your name using various techniques to rank higher than negative results. Pricing varies depending on your needs; starts at around $3000 and goes up to $15,000.
RemoveYourName.com is a website that uses the technique described above of pushing down bad or unwanted results. Pricing also varies on the package that you get.
There is no way to completely erase information that is already indexed by the search engines. Not only do they keep cached copies of the pages, but there are also services out there that go through all of the web pages on the Internet and create copies of them at specific times. ..
Google has removed a past version of this page from its search engine index, but someone who has access to the Internet Archive can still view it.
In conclusion, getting search results removed or pushed down is a fairly hard process with absolutely no guarantees of success. Your best bet is to put continuous effort for an extended period of time. If you have any questions, post a comment. Enjoy!
