I have very minimal knowledge about how to go about this so here goes... A couple years ago I VERY stupidly posted an offending comment on a site not being aware of how dangerous and hurtful this could be to my future. Since then this comment has showed up at the very top on the first page in google, and it's driving me crazy. It almost certainly affects my empoyment opportunities in the future, and the worry is killing me. I found some websites that claim to push back pages like these further down to the 2nd, 3rd page of google making them more difficult for employers to find. Does anyone have any experiences with these sites/companies? Is there anything that I can do? I've tried contacting the admins to no avail, I get no response. I really need help with this problem, please any suggestions are welcome.
The only way to have stuff stop showing up on google from another persons site is through the owner of the site. If it is from YOUR site then you can create .htaccess to block the Google spider.
I do not own the site. I tried emailing them several times but I get no reply. I am willing to hire a personal reputation management company to help me push back this site further down the google pages, but I don't know who to hire. I'm not very tech savy btw. I'm at the point where I'm willing to spend a lot of money to help my situation, being at wits end. Is my situation hopeless, what can I do? I really appreciate responses.
well, if you dont own the site and dont have any luck contacting the admin, then you are in a challenging situation. sorry to say that there is no way for you to remove the content/comment. regarding the method you are talking about, pushing your comment page to 2nd or 3rd page or even deeper so that your potential employer cannot find it, it is very much possible. this method falls under reputation management where lot of companies utilize this method to counter negative feedback posted by their unhappy clients. you basically keep building sites/blogs/web 2.0 pages with your desired content and promote those pages to bring them up to google front page. some companies would get enough pages built and promoted to dominate first 2-3 pages of google so that potential visitors can only find positive reviews about the company. an seo company who is knowledgeable enough to help you protect/maintain your reputation will not be cheap. there are so called SEO companies who would work for $5/hour but dont expect much result. if you do decide to hire an SEO company, do a little background check about the company in question.