Looking for a way to remove your name from Google? Have you tried to Google your own name lately? Anything “interesting” come up that you would rather not appear in the first page for everyone to see!? I had written a post several months back on the results of Googling my own name, which turned out to be quite an eye opener as I ended up being in 71 of the top 100 results in Google!

Luckily for me, there’s nothing bad out there on me yet! The main issue with the Internet is that you may have never done anything outrageous in your life, but someone else could easily defame or slander you without you even knowing it! Either way, there are a couple of things that you can do to remove your name from the search engines, but note that none of them have any guarantees.

To start, there are literally two ways to remove bad press from Google and other search engines if you already have something out there:

1. Either contact the site or sites that have this information posted and ask them to remove it kindly! Hope that they agree otherwise, step 2:
2. You can slowly outrank the current information that is out there so that is shows up further behind the good stuff about you.

For the first method, you can find out the contact information for any website by going looking it up in the WHOIS database. Check out the following three and you might get an email address or contact number for the registered person of the site:

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp

http://whois.domaintools.com/

http://www.internic.net/whois.html

Hopefully, it’s not your arch enemy that has this information posted about you, otherwise there’s nothing you can really do unless it can be considered libel by law. If it’s naked pictures of you during Spring Break, you’re done!

The next step would then be to try to bury the bad results past the known number of search results that most people look at, which is about 50. I personally don’t go past 20 or 30 search results, so you’re pretty safe if it’s that far behind.

There are a couple of websites, services, tools, etc that you can use to accomplish this. Note that there really is no way to COMPLETELY erase information that is already indexed by the search engines because not only do they keep cached copies of the pages, but there are also services out there that go through all of the web pages on the Internet and create copies of them at specific times.