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How does one go about removing slanderous websites from Google results?
My friend has been having trouble in interviews as potential employers have " Googled " his name and found slanderous information about him. All this info is completely false
Who in Google should be contacted in order to remove these results from the results page?
Answers (9)
Roi H
CEO at Tens (SEO) Ltd. (1first1[at]gmail) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & web marketing. Owner, Match Bio Systems
This is a common problem that a lot of people and companies deal with. Google will not arbitrarily change its search results only because you are not pleased with them. They claim that they are not manually altering their results and any deviation from that policy would cause them to lose trust in the eyes of their customers.
That said, your friend's problem has a solution - there are several companies that deal with this kind of situation. Their service is called "online reputation management". I know of a company that has helped a number of people and companies solve this kind of problem in the past - http://www.reputationfixer.com. I have only heard good things about their service and the results they deliver.
Links:
There are several things you can do about it. Like Roi said, unless the offending site is using trade marked or copyrighted materials, Google is not likley to get involved.
So what can you do?
1. Try and contact the Hosting company of the website in question. Depending on the host you may have to go up a chain of resellers to find the real physical host.
2. You can also try and create a number of pages & websites that rank highly for your friend's name. When done properly this can push down the offending sites to the 2nd or 3rd page of Google.
Darrell G
darrell.grainger@gmail.com
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Google is not responsible for the information it finds. You'll need to contact the sites which are hosting the information. I would suggest your friend googles his name, find all the sites which have slanderous information.
If you cannot find contact information on the offending site, go to somewhere like http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp and enter the site name. This service will tell you things like the administrator and owner of the site.
Once you know who is hosting the slanderous information you have a few options:
1) ask the site to remove it.
2) ask the ISP for the site to cut off the site.
3) take legal action
One of the biggest problems you might find is sites like http://www.archive.org/web/web.php. They archive this information. Additionally, site replicate newsgroup or discussion board postings. I have heard there is a site in India which copies the entries from LinkedIn.
Your friend might also want to use other search engines, e.g. Yahoo, AltaVista, etc. and see what comes up with them as well.
1. If the sites are posting slanderous information, then there may be cause for a lawsuit. I don't recommend this because it's expensive and even if you win, your name will now appear in stories/documents related to the lawsuit.
2. You can buy the offending sites and shut them down. Expensive!
3. You can push the offending sites down in the search engine results by pushing more friendly sites up in the rankings. Also expensive and will take some time to show results. But it's probably worth it if your friend wants to work (and date!) in the future.
John N
Owner, SiteTruth
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For individuals, this can work. For companies, it's likely to backfire.
If a company tries to suppress unfavorable information, it's likely to end up with a Wikipedia article showing the unfavorable information, with citations, footnotes, excepts from legal documents, and peer review. And there it will stay, up near the top of search results, for years to come.
Gaurav S
Web Technologist
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Just like others said, Google is just a messenger. It is likely that Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc. will also have the information indexed. Kill the source than the messenger.
You can't do anything about this. Because when someone type your name then Google or other search engines looks up for data into their data centers that is crawled by their crawlers/spiders and store into their servers then search engines retrieve data based on your typed keywords. So if you or someone else have submit some slanderous information about you then it'll show in search terms if that particular page is crawled by spiders. And Google never do manual changes.
The only thing you can do about this is to try to contact the webmaster of that website on which your data appears and request him to remove that info.
I second Alon Cohen's answer, not because I know him, but actually I have done the same thing for a lawyer in the past sucessfully. The lawyer had something on SEC that was not good, and he wanted those results to go away from Page 1, and they did. It's not as difficult as it sounds provided its done correctly.
The more you do it, the farther from page 1 can you push the offending pages to. I hope that helps :).
Neil and his team at ACS is one of the most reputable and respected SEO/Reputation Management firms around.
http://acsseo.com/services/reputation/
I would give them a quick buzz to see what they think about your friends situation. I would also suggest you contact the site owner to find out why they're slandering your friend.