[Caractacus Potts]

Question for the tech savvy...

A friend got arrested a few weeks ago and when you type name into Google it shows up on the first page.

How can you make it so it shows up on a much later page?

Thanks

[IvanDrago]

Have you tried turning it off and back on again.

[The Beast1]

He'd have to get his name onto a ton of different websites for the bad stuff to get pushed down. Linkedin , a public facebook, etc etc.

At the moment, there is nothing he can do in the immediate short term. Arrests and such info are public records especially if it made the news.

The best he can do is a name change.

[Caractacus Potts]

Do you think this could be farmed out to Fiverr?

Do a bunch of different permutations of the name and address and post them to a hundred websites?

And no the "friend" is not me.

[VolandoVengoVolandoVoy]

If his name is unique/uncommon, he's boned.

It's really difficult to mess with the google search rankings.

Making original content with his name that is not negative is a good idea, this is a somewhat drawn out process though, and likely won't help if he's applying for a job anytime soon.

On the bright side, if you do figure out an efficient way to bury the embarrassing incident, keep that shit to yourself. You have stumbled upon a gold mine.

[Saladin]

This is called reputation management.

You create profiles and web properties on different websites, maybe even register a domain of your own.

The difficultly depends on the authority of the page and domain you're trying to push down.

I.e if its a local city page, it should be a helluva lot easier to push down than something in the New York Times.

PM me if he's interested, I could help him out.

[Brodiaga]

Does anybody know how to take down an old twitter post with my name posted by somebody else? The post is neutral, I just don't want it to be there. That person is unreachable, probably forgot about the account.

[jamaicabound]

What specifically is showing up. Is it the actual court records or dockets on a .gov site or are we talking about all those sites that like syndicate arrest data and post mugshots and all that nonsense?

The court thing not much you can do but try to get it expunged and deleted from the site. For those other sites some charge for them to remove them, others if you write a strongly worded email they will take it down, or the other option is to pay a reputation management service to put up a bunch of positive stuff to drown that out.

I don't know someone not tech saavy could completely bury it but honestly it wouldn't be that hard to at least get some other stuff ahead in search results. Thing about sites that rank really high would be like profiles on accounts on big name sites, using his real name of course, and the same way its written in the court docks. Sites like yelp, if he had a business setup a yelp page, google plus shows up really high, yahoo answers.

I don't think you will be able to erase whats out there but you can maybe hope to drop it to second or third page by flooding top searches with powerful site profiles and get his name online in a positive way or in reference to a business or something.

Lastly, not that this will help him immediately but I believe several states have gone after sites like this saying they basically amount to extortion to take your name back. Hopefully that trend continues.

[polar]

Even if you search optimize the first few pages of Google with good content it'd come up with a targeted search as any serious background check would do.

[xtr3m]

http://brandyourself.com/

[jamaicabound]

(05-14-2015 12:04 PM)polar Wrote:  

Even if you search optimize the first few pages of Google with good content it'd come up with a targeted search as any serious background check would do. I.e. Google "John Doe" + (crime OR arrest OR court) ...etc.

True, the only true way to make this go away is to go through the court process of getting this expunged and then try to get it taken off all the websites. It's a lot of work, a buddy of mine had to go through the same thing for a possession of paraphanalia charge. It's a huge headache but worth it.

Just populating the first couple pages of google results won't hide it from a background check but will stop just a casual searcher from finding it. Could be anything from someone your dating, to your parents, or heck, some jobs don't do full scale background checks or hire a service but just do a casual google search.

At my old workplace it was a startup, we didn't drug test and weren't big on background checks or anything like that. that said before we interviewed people we would google them just to see what popped up. It was almost as much out of curiousity as it was to guage them as a job prospect. We didn't dig too deep just whatever popped up took a quick glance. You'd be shocked that some people applying for a professional job have a non private facebook account with pics of them snorting coke and stuff like that.

At my previous place like I said it was all younger people, I don't think anyone even really had an issue with the coke so much as if you are stupid enough to have that on facebook for us to find we don't want to hire you.

If you really want this gone you need to go through the expungement process. If you don't want to do that next best option is hire a reputation management service and lastly doing it yourself won't be perfect but is better than nothing.

[Caractacus Potts]

I want to thank everyone for their advice and offers of help. My help has been rejected.

The individual in question works in marketing and has some background in SEO. I was basically told I don't know what I am talking about, blah, blah, blah.

Have to go forward with court and try to get it expunged at a later date. So much for trying to help.