What do you do when search results for your name or company prominently returns results that contain negative or otherwise undesireable infomation? Can you remove these from the search index or otherwise prevent interested parties in uncovering the information contain therein?
I've had to deal with such situations a handful of times and, as is anything, it highly depends on the situation. I remember years ago searching for my name would return links to a Japanese art contest that I somehow placed in when I was a teenager. As I became older and embarassed of the quality of these works I set about having the relavent pages removed. This was in the late 90s and I didn't know much about how search engines indexed and ranked websites so I took the only course of action that seemed available to me, I wrote whatever email address I could find associated with the contest and requested they remove the relavent pages. I don't know if it was due to the language barrier or if the site itself was even maintained any longer but this strategy didn't work. Over time the pages ended up pushed so far down that I'm not even sure I could find them anymore.
Managing Personal Reputation (i.e. what comes up when you search for yourself)
Yesterday I had a woman contact us inquiring whether we could remove or hide a handful of pages that contained damaging infomation about her father. It seems that many years before he was involved in some dispute or litagation that was a matter of public record and a government site had made certain documents about this situation available online and these documents were prominately featured when someone searched for her father's name in Google.
While I told her that in all liklihood our rates would be too high for it to make sense to hire us, I did spend maybe 15-minutes telling her what she could do herself to push these results down.
Given that it was public record, contacting the site and requesting that they remove the offending material would probably not be successful. Additionally the man's name was uncommon, which decreased the liklihood of pre-existing 'noise', such as references to other people with the same name.
Managing this would likely be a simple, if time consuming, matter: muddy the waters. Use the name in question to respond to blog posts, on forum posts, to create a personal website using the name as the domain. While posting to many blogs these days has little value in generating incoming links to your own website due to 'nofollow', the pages are still indexed and will show up in search results. In this particular cases all the offending pages used the middle name of the father, making them more suceptible to being pushed down for the vast majority of searches, which would likily only use his first and last name.
This should be enough for cases like this or the one I faced that I described above because the damange was inadvertant, noone was intentially attempting to get the offending material to come up for that particular query. This is often the case for personal reputation management and is the primary characteristic separating it from managing a business' online reputation.
Check back soon for part two, which will dicuss the trickier topic of corporate reputation management.