Hi DigitalPoint Team, I'm new here, so I hope it's okay to post this question. I'm wondering if anyone has expertise on getting Google to remove or flag a web site? I have an author client who writes inspirational fiction. When you Google her name for audio books, the site that comes up number 1 in the search engine is a strange url that includes her name as part of the subdomain address. This url automatically forwards to a really, truly raunchy porn site. Since my client writes faith-based fiction, and many of her readers are younger girls, this search result is especially troubling. I've reported the whole problem to Google via their Report Spam form here: Report a Spam Result , but I'm wondering if there's anything else I should be doing, or any way I can expedite the flagging or removal of the site. Do any of you have suggestions? How would you handle this situation if this was your client? I'd so appreciate your insights... Kelli P.S. I have not given the url for the "audio books" site here for a reason. No one should have to see what I've seen today, so please don't ask me for the link!
It must have been something really dreadful. Aside from that, the way I see the problem, there isn't much you can do, except what you have already done. You can also try to contact the site owner, and maybe he is a nice person and removes or renames the page.
If you are unable to get the site removed - the other option is what is often termed reputation management. I'll try and dig up something that explains it more succintly - but basically it involves a fair amount of work to: 1. Leverage existing trusting domains such as social networking profiles, review sites, yahoo answer style stuff, article sites etc 2. Optimise them to rank above the porn site (this can sometimes be easier than building a new site from scratch to that point) 3. Do it enough times so the bad result is pushed to the second page. 4. It will still be there - but if someone is searching for your client they will almost certainly click on one of the profiles - which can then be linked to the client's website (this will hopefully short-cut them ever reaching the second page) This is a tactic that is also used when people actually have genuinely bad stuff that they have done ranking for their name (i.e. negative publicity for a company) Dylan
your best bet is to try and outrank the site using the methods that Dylan Tovey suggested above...bury the site...to the second and third pages that no one can see.... Myspace profile, squidoo lens...use a couple subdomains...
Hi Kelli, This post might be helpful: http://www.stuntdubl.com/2007/07/11/reputation-management/ It has a very basic overview of some of the tactics you can use. It also links to some fairly useful reputation management guides. Dylan
Dylan & SEO Ranter, I cannot thank you enough for your incredible, informative suggestions. I immediately put them into practice. We bought a custom domain name with the audio book keywords in it. We set up a specialty page with all this author's actual audio books on it. We reported the other sites (yes, we discovered there was more than one, this was a very organized, widespread campaign on their part) as spam to Google. The worst of the sites Google immediately removed from their index. Now we're just doing the work to build the page rank of the new audio books page we created. Your advice made all the difference. THANK YOU AGAIN!!!! Kelli