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Which SEO Strategy Resolves this Issue?

by egrizzly
6 replies
  • SEO
    • |
So a friend of mine got a bit unlucky and got into some trouble with the law landing him in prison. Long story short - Anytime he meets somebody new and they search for him on Google to locate his LinkedIn page the search results reveal the newspaper articles where he was arrested by the police. This has been going on now for the past 6 years.

I believe some of these newspaper sites are getting crawled and the information about his unfortunate criminal past is getting replicated all over google even though that it's now static of course and no new original information is being written about him.

The following are true:

- those sites reporting the bad criminal information are washingtonpost.com, ice.gov, and rapsheets.org

- the sites are all very old (1995 was creation date for washingtonpost.com, 1994 for ice.gov, and 2017 for rapsheets.org)

- the sites have about a 6% density of his name per all words on the individual websites

- those sites are frequently updated with new information about other offending criminals.

So from my observations it seems as though his criminal past is staying on the first page of google due to the strong SEO posture of the three websites I mentioned.

Would the solution to removing his criminal past from the first page not be purposely blogging new information regularly to other aged domains while requesting that his name be removed from washingtonpost.com and other mentioned sites. Supposedly after google crawls his frequently published blogs it would bump the static presence of his name in Washingtonpost.com, ice.gov, and rapsheets.org?

As I'm still a rookie in the SEO space these are just my initial opinions as to the solution. For those of you experienced guys please feel free to add your own expert opinion.
#issue #resolves #seo #strategy
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  • Profile picture of the author Faulkner
    If your friend resides in one of the countries in EU, he has the right to be forgotten. Requests can actually be made to all search engines to remove certain results about him from search queries within the EU. For example, here's Google's privacy removal form.

    Originally Posted by egrizzly View Post

    while requesting that his name be removed from washingtonpost.com
    This is almost impossible without a court order. Even with a court order, the Post's executive editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber played him in the Academy Award-winning film, Spotlight), will probably fight the order until humans have landed on Mars.

    I'm far from an SEO-expert, but use his real name to register accounts on the social media and high profile websites (Wikipedia, Youtube, etc) to flood the search result page.

    That said, before you help your friend out, you should probably ask yourself (if you haven't already) whether he really deserves to have his name scrubbed from search results.
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Originally Posted by egrizzly View Post

    The following are true:

    - those sites reporting the bad criminal information are washingtonpost.com, ice.gov, and rapsheets.org

    - the sites are all very old (1995 was creation date for washingtonpost.com, 1994 for ice.gov, and 2017 for rapsheets.org)

    - the sites have about a 6% density of his name per all words on the individual websites

    - those sites are frequently updated with new information about other offending criminals.

    So from my observations it seems as though his criminal past is staying on the first page of google due to the strong SEO posture of the three websites I mentioned.

    None of that has a thing to do with why they are ranking. It's not the age of the domains. Keyword density does not matter. Google could care less how often the sites are updated.

    They are ranking well because there are tons of links pointing to those sites and probably quite a few to the individual pages where your friend is mentioned.

    Like Faulkner mentioned, if he is in the EU, the right to be forgotten is your best bet. None of those sites are going to remove any of that information otherwise unless it was proven to be untrue.

    The only other option is to try to outrank the pages. That is going to take time and probably a decent budget to work with.
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    • Profile picture of the author egrizzly
      So basically the back-links leading to the page where he was mentioned. That is an SEO strategy. Thanks I'll consider that as one of the options to counter.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    OP said ICE, that's US border patrol.
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    • Profile picture of the author egrizzly
      It is indeed. means Immigration & Customs Enforcement.
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  • Profile picture of the author tomopalinski
    It really comes down to creating something online that will be more enticing to press on than the articles about his criminal past.

    Google always prefers the content that is being clicked on in SERP. Since people have a natural tendency to be drawn to crime and violence, whenever somebody types in your friend's name, the first thing they click on are the articles.

    Because of this positive feedback, Google keeps this kind of content on the first page. Even though it negatively affects your friend's present situation, the algorithm cares about showing the content that is most likely to be engaging.

    Unless you can create something that is more engaging than those articles and get it ranking above them, people will continue to click on those articles.

    The best way is to request this information to be removed the way Faulkner suggested. Good luck.
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    Good SEO work only gets better over time. It is only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change. -- Jill Whalen

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