I have a friend whose name is distinctive enough that all the top hits on a Google search for it are indeed about her. Recently, a page went up with some embarrasing info about her, and it’s one of the top hits now. Since she can’t affect the page which posted the info, I assume that the only way to lower its prominence in the search is to create more links to other pages which mention her, so as to supercede the bad result with these.
Is there is a ready way to do this? I have seen social networking site (e.g.: tribe.net) threads as hits on Google in the past, for example. Does this mean that if she joins up and posts to very active threads, signing her full name, these threads will eventually overrun the result she wishes to suppress? Are there other ways to generate “noise” to dampen the impact of the bad “signal”?
If it is truly that important to her, the time would be better spent just hiring a lawyer to write a cease and desist letter and mail it to the website owners. Now, we have freedom of speech in this country and she probably wouldn’t win a lawsuit if she pressed the matter especially if it is true, but that isn’t the point. People get scared of those letters.
I understand that Google takes very seriously any attempt to mess with search rankings. If she is found to be trying to up some sites, those sites might find themselves excluded from Google.
As the Wikipedia article on Google Bombing mentions, a spokesperson for Google commented in 2005 thusly:
She was careful to say reluctant to and not never going to, but clearly it’s gotta be something much more exceptional than some kind of ad hominem (or in this case, ad feminem) campaign for or against some otherwise anonymous netizen.
If that were the case, it would be a great way for online companies to hit competitors by messing with their (the competitors’) Google rankings. Soon, there wouldn’t be too many sites left, so I don’t think Google can afford to be too strict about that.
One idea is for her to register her name as a domain name, get a cheap Web hosting account, and create a multi-page site. with a blog, photo gallery - as many pages as possible that include both her name and unique content. These might push the undesirable results further down.
This happens all the time. The only time a lawsuit was successful so far is when a company used a competitor’s name in their keywords. The judge ruled it was a deliberate attempt to misguide consumers. However courts ruled that a former playboy playmate can legitimately use the words playboy and playmate in her keywords
What the court decided is no one owns words or keywords, but they MAY own those keywords in a context.
Remember links are only ONE thing that Google and other search engines lookfor. They use keyword density, the use Heading tags, the number of time the name of this site appears in the links. This is why you should never use “Click Here” as a link. Because Google weighs that. You should use go to “mydomain” and have the word mydomain be a clickable link.
I myself once received a note from someone because I put a bad review on Amazon. They asked me to remove it, and implied they would take action if I didn’t. I told them “No,” take it up with Amazon. Because Amazon is so well linked, my “Bad” review of their product appears way ahead of the companies website. It is still there. It’s quite common now for “bad” things to appear before companies. A lot of companies have people to make sites to drown out the competition.
Look at the Wikipedia. Now many organizations have made it a position, or added the duty to another person’s job, to keep bad things out of the Wikipedia because of it’s high rank.
So remember LINKS are just ONE thing search engines look for. Get a book on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) from the library and then work on getting many pages put in Google to push offending page out.