When a Google People Search Turns Up Unpleasant Information

Back in March, Google caused quite an uproar altering its algorithm in a major way to make sure that content farms and other low-quality websites don't make it to the top of your search results. They even tried to put control into the hands of the searching public by giving them the power to block results from specific websites when they searched. While all that is just excellent, what does Google do to put power into the hands of the consumer when it comes to search results about himself? If you were to perform a Google people search on yourself and find upsetting information, how come you can't do anything about it? Unless you can prove to Google that there's something illegal or unethical about how that information comes to present something about yourself, there is very little that you can get Google to do.

If you are unhappy in any way about what your own name turns up, if you feel that the results don't represent you accurately, there is very little that you can do, usually, short of setting up a few websites about yourself that will bring the right kind of information to the top. There are business people out there who have endless trouble with this kind of thing – Google destroying any chances they have at success. They may, for instance, have had an old consumer file a lawsuit against them 10 years ago. Since that happens to be quite an interesting morsel of information, anytime Google receives a search about them, that lawsuit might turn right up. Even if it isn't really relevant. The trick lies in trying to find out what you can do about it.

When something on a Google people search is unflattering or really unfair and inconvenient, you could try to contact the webmaster of the website that has the information up. While this can work for the individual webmaster, if anything about you appears on a large and popular website, you could have quite a time convincing the webmasters to even talk to you. Should you succeed though, you would need to do a thorough job to the remove the URL from Google's index.

If you don't really succeed in convincing the webmaster to do this nice thing for you, which, if you think about it, is the likely scenario, Google asks you to do something rather unusual. You need to open a couple of blogs or websites about yourself so that Google people search finds the best information about you in a place that you designed yourself. The other offending websites will be pushed rather low in the top 10.

If nothing seems to work, a drastic step could work - you could need to change your name so that your name is no longer associated with things that Google has information on you about.