4 ms·
Ask HN: Online privacy / "reverse SEO"
I have an online privacy question that I thought you guys could help with.
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.
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.
Any ideas? Getting sites to take down the articles seems like a fools errand. Thanks!
- th0ma5 17y agoI 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.
- tjr 17y agoAgreed. 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.
- aewal 17y agoThanks - quite a few sites on there I didn't realize could rank high
- khafra 17y agoPerhaps this is a business opportunity--Reverse SEO.
- ApolloRising 17y agoIf 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.