

Ask HN: Online privacy / "reverse SEO" - aewal

I have an online privacy question that I thought you guys could help with.<p>Here's the situation.  A few years ago, a friend had a personal crisis and talked to reporters about it.  Articles went up over the web, which helped draw attention to her problem.  She has a distinctive enough name that Googling her name shows the articles, but it wasn't a huge national news item or anything like that.<p>She's now wondering if there's a way to get rid of them, or move them down in the search results, since she doesn't necessarily want employers finding this stuff, etc.<p>Any ideas? Getting sites to take down the articles seems like a fools errand. Thanks!
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th0ma5
I have had success with getting some sites to remove key things that I didn't
like. However, most successfully I have managed to make my own sites be the
first results for my name, or at least higher than everything else. I have
also had success with being more active with my full name in places that have
higher pagerank than the stuff that is just older or otherwise not really
representative of who I am.

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tjr
Agreed. A Google search of my name (no quotes) brings up...

    
    
      1) my web site, modestly named after myself
      2) my amazon.com profile
      3) one of my music albums on cdbaby.com
      4) my weblog at MIT
      5) my linkedin profile
      6) my GNU Savannah profile
      7) my photo.net profile
      8) my facebook profile
    

So perhaps getting one's name onto some other more high-profile sites is a
decent way to wash out some unwanted history.

Edit: ...whereas a now embarassingly uninformed post that I made to a mailing
list in my earlier days on the web doesn't show up until page 10 of Google
results. Used to be on the first page.

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aewal
Thanks - quite a few sites on there I didn't realize could rank high

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ApolloRising
If she has a middle name use that on the job applications if her last name is
not as unique as her first.

Go crazy and add yourself to every social networking profile you can get as
one of the links above have said.

Call the editors and request the article be removed, if it is old news and
nothing really valuable, they may just do it to respect her privacy. I would
do this via phone not email so you get to speak to a human being that
understands her situation.

Buy her a domain name with her name in the url. Use that to rank very highly.
Does not need anything more than a pure html template with her name and some
random bits of info on it.

There is a service called reputation defender or some such name. They
specialize in this sorta stuff, not sure how much they charge etc. Just
figured I would mention it if it really mattered that much.

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khafra
Perhaps this is a business opportunity--Reverse SEO.

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aewal
"Reverse SEO." Great! I was wondering what to call it - I've co-oped your name
into the title.

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pbhjpbhj
It's just regular SEO. It's called "reputation management".

<http://www.seomoz.org/blog/reputation-management>

