How to remove your name from search engines

Posted on March 4, 2008 at 7:14 am

Looking for a way to remove your name from Google? Have you tried to Google your own name lately? Anything “interesting” come up that you would rather not appear in the first page for everyone to see!? I had written a post several months back on the results of Googling my own name, which turned out to be quite an eye opener as I ended up being in 71 of the top 100 results in Google!

Luckily for me, there’s nothing bad out there on me yet! The main issue with the Internet is that you may have never done anything outrageous in your life, but someone else could easily defame or slander you without you even knowing it! Either way, there are a couple of things that you can do to remove your name from the search engines, but note that none of them have any guarantees.

To start, there are literally two ways to remove bad press from Google and other search engines if you already have something out there:

Either contact the site or sites that have this information posted and ask them to remove it kindly! Hope that they agree otherwise, step 2:
You can slowly outrank the current information that is out there so that is shows up further behind the good stuff about you.

For the first method, you can find out the contact information for any website by going looking it up in the WHOIS database. Check out the following three and you might get an email address or contact number for the registered person of the site:

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp

http://whois.domaintools.com/

http://www.internic.net/whois.html

Hopefully, it’s not your arch enemy that has this information posted about you, otherwise there’s nothing you can really do unless it can be considered libel by law. If it’s naked pictures of you during Spring Break, you’re done!

The next step would then be to try to bury the bad results past the known number of search results that most people look at, which is about 50. I personally don’t go past 20 or 30 search results, so you’re pretty safe if it’s that far behind.

There are a couple of websites, services, tools, etc that you can use to accomplish this. Note that there really is no way to COMPLETELY erase information that is already indexed by the search engines because not only do they keep cached copies of the pages, but there are also services out there that go through all of the web pages on the Internet and create copies of them at specific times.

So even if you were to get a site to remove some bad content and Google updates its index with the new information, you could always go to Internet Archive and view a past version of the page.

How to manage your online identity

So the only other way to remove bad search results for your name is to get lots of good results show up before it. Here are a couple of online personal profile services that are indexed by the search engines and will show up pretty high for most names.

	This is probably one of the most popular professional networking sites out there. Creating a profile on here will definitely get you a bit of attention on the search engines.

	Plaxo has over 15 million users and keeps growing fast! It’s a great way to keep in touch and up to date with your closet people. It’s also a great way to have you info show up in the search engines.

	Using Ziki, you can create your own personal or business profile page. The site has a good amount of power in Google and if you don’t have a common name like “John Smith”, you’ll probably show up number 1 using Ziki.

	Another similar service that will try to shoot you up in the rankings based on your name. You can add whatever type of information you want for your personal page.

	Very similar to NetFame and tries to accomplish the same goal. Worth a shot if you have no other choice!

There are also many other sites that you could try out to get your name to show up higher. For example, if you search my name “Aseem Kishore”, you’ll see I show up for Newsvine.com, Blogger profile, SEOmoz profile, Amazon.com profile, etc. Wherever you can create a profile, make you to create one!

Remember all of these methods will take weeks possibly months to actually work. You won’t be able to just create a few profiles and have them suddenly appear in Google! It takes times and patience. Another way to do this is to search other people’s names and see what sites they show up for and then go sign up on those yourself.

Finally, if none of that works, you can actually use some paid services that will remove your name from search engines for various prices. Most of them at least honestly state that it’s going to take 4 to 6 months to truly have all the bad stuff pushed further down in the rankings. Anyone touting instant removal or anything like that is a fake because it’s impossible to remove information from search engines permanently!

Services to remove your name from search engines

Zallas Technologies - Takes 4 to 6 months to remove your bad or negative information. Uses the same technique as the other company. Have to call to get a quote.

RemoveYourName.com - Uses the technique described above of pushing down bad or unwanted results. Start at $695 to push data out from the first page, and $995 to remove from the first TWO pages.

Complaint Remover - These guys are a little more hardcore and actually send out cease and desist orders on sites that have negative information about you. They also claim to use SEO tactics to get other results to show up higher.

So that’s about it! Hopefully that helps you in your endeavor to remove unwanted information about your name from Google and other search engines! Remember, the best way to avoid any of this is to simply NOT USE YOUR NAME! Don’t post your real name in forums, blog posts, online accounts, etc, if you don’t have to. The less your name is on the net, the less likely it will show up. Enjoy!

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6 Responses to “How to remove your name from search engines”

JF Ruiz said on : March 4th, 2008 at 8:29 am

Thanks for mentionning Ziki. You’ve forget to mention that we have a promotional offer that guarantee you to be placed first even if you have a common name. Indeed we place a sponsored links on the first place on every search result pages for our pro members.

It takes us less than 72h to put you on the first place on your name For the natural ranking most of the time it takes only some hours to appears on Google with ziki.

san said on : March 6th, 2008 at 9:14 pm

i love ur blog (i subscribe to it) but of all posts i thot u had a brilliant instant idea…pretty disappointed at this one - based on ur standards in tips…

akishore said on : March 6th, 2008 at 9:52 pm

Hi San,

Thanks for the comment! I try my best to bring the best tips I can to readers. Can you tell me what exactly you were disappointed with?

Thanks!

Jamie McMillan said on : April 4th, 2008 at 5:38 pm

I took a look at those companies and was wondering if anyone had any feedback using them? There are two other companies that i found that seem to provide similar service.

http://www.ReputationDefender.com and http://www.CyberFootprints.com

I was just wondering if anyone has used any of them with any luck?

Thanks your suggestions are appreciated.

samuel anderson alvarenga said on : April 25th, 2008 at 2:37 am

Bom dia.
Gostaria de retirar o meu nome do site de pesquisas “google” onde consta na primeira página em que eu entrei com um processo contra uma Produtora de Cinema, através da TJMG. Me sinto constrangido e é chato às vezes, alguém ter de consultar o meu nome e logo na primeira página aparecer esse tipo de informação.

Atenciosamente,

Samuel.

Online Reputation Management- How to Remove your Name from Search Engine’s » Web Design Blog Says:

[...] for me, there’s nothing bad out there on me yet! The main issue with the Internet is that you may have never done anything outrageous in your life, but someone else could easily [...]
March 14th, 2008 at 12:44 pm