I’m a member of a lot of different internet forums and made the mistake of using the first part of my email address as my username, so anyone doing a search based on my email address can find out alot about me. Since I typically can’t change my username in these forums do I have to change my email address to get any privacy? Are there settings hidden or otherwise in most forum software that would stop these
posts from showing up in Google?
In my experience about 50% of forums want their content googled so they can attract new users and the other half use robots.txt to stop anything past the front page.
There isn’t a huge amount you can do to get this removed from the index either. Google have some pages explaining how to get content removed, but if you don’t own the host that the data came from you won’t get far.
If this really bothers you, I’d change your email address and hope that people forget your old. People don’t seem to realise that literally anything you put on the net is going to be there forever. And thats a long time.
Sorry it’s not better news,
Tim