I regularly peruse the Answers section of LinkedIn, where members post questions for the community, and I stumble on this question this morning:
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?
I answered with something similar to this:
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.
In the era of search engines, lawsuits have a great potential to damage your reputation, because news and court documents about the lawsuit will most likely have a high authority and rank well for your name. You can’t always avoid being sued, but you should think twice about suing someone else. What’s it going to look like on the SERPs?
2. You can buy the offending sites and shut them down.
This could be really expensive, depending on the source of the offending information. Unless you’re Rupert Murdoch, you’re not going to buy the New York Times for printing a nasty article about you. But what if it’s a smaller blog? Or a message board?
You may be able to pay the owner to remove the offending information or you may be able to buy him out. Of course, this could also backfire–you don’t want to replace one bad reference to you with a result that says “Joe Jerkface tries to bribe site that called him a jerk.” Bad times.
3. The best way to improve your SERP reputation is probably to push the offending sites down in the search engine results by pushing more friendly sites up in the rankings. This method may be cheaper if you can do it yourself, or more expensive if you’re going to hire someone to do it for you.
I recommend getting a confidentiality agreement from whomever you hire. And remember that it may take months to show results, if you’re creating new pages that are going to rank above the offending result. It will take even longer if you’re trying to outrank a highly trusted site like a newspaper or your local courthouse.
But it’s probably worth it if you want to work (or date!) in the future.
