Google's power to destroy a name

by Rob Stokes

Recently I've had encountered a man with a terrible problem. He is a fairly powerful and well known person faced with an unusual issue that has the potential to ruin his good name and standing in the community.

More than 10 years ago a rather defamatory article was written about him. Subsequently the contents of the article turned out to be completely untrue but is has been archived on a website nevertheless. (I have to be specifically vague here for confidentiality reasons).

When you type his name into Google, a link to the slanderous article and some pretty vicious description text is always near the top of the page. This is extremely unpleasant for such a decent man and he is most concerned that current or future associates, business or personal, might find this offensive information and judge him on it as a result.

Knowing what it says and the fact that Googling someone's name to establish their cred is becoming commonplace, I would also be very concerned.

Given that there is no way to get rid of the content, Google certainly don't care and the site that it is on is notoriously difficult to influence, the only choice we have is to try and push it lower on the rankings.

To achieve this we will create some powerfully search engine optimised content (saying decent, truthful things about him) that will in effect force this offending content off the first results page. It's going to be a long old process however especially since we can't use a few cunning link building tactics because we don't actually want people to know about this. I mean I could make this blog post a whole lot more explicit giving his name and everything and it would probably trump the dodgy content - but that would be a bit of a PR nightmare for the man especially given this blog's massive readership (mwahahaha not). You get my drift though.

The reason why I am blogging about this is because I think it is madness. The search engines have so much power that they can literally ruin a person's career without even knowing it. Surely that is wrong?

But what can realistically be done to stop this kind of situation. With billions of pages to crawl and rank, the search engines just don't have the time to get involved in such disputes.

Has anyone else had similar experiences?

2005/06/16 | permalink | comments (2) | trackbacks (0)

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