Fight old google image thumbnails with new ones?

3 replies
  • SEO
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Hi I have a potential client. Keyword is potential.

He is a big celebrity basically and he wants to get rid of or hide bad publicity photos. If you search his name in google results on the right hand side you will see various thumbnails of him. These thumbnails are archived from other celebrity gossip websites of course.

I obviously can't get them removed from google because I am not the owner of the pictures, and the owners for alot of these sites want a large sum of money to remove them from their site since they own the rights.

I was thinking what if I fought fire with fire. Purchase several domains with similar content about the celebrity and add the photos he wants to come up in search results. My thought is that eventually it will be enough to hide the bad ones at first glance with the new ones. On the other hand of course I feel this could backfire as the bad publicity is what an ex partner keeps leaking out on him through photos. This is definitely something different but the payout would be well worth the troubles if done right. My question is can I handle this client or do I tell him I can't do this. I personally don't think I can but was wondering how others would handle the situation.
#fight #google #image #thumbnails
  • Profile picture of the author danparks
    It is possible to replace images that show up in Google results using the same SEO tactics used to rank pages.

    I had a client that had a "mug shot" of his appear as one of the 5 or 6 thumbnail images that appear in a row on the first page of some search results. I simply searched Google Images for the person's name and found other images I wanted to replace the current "bad" image. I went to the pages those images were on, noted the page URLs, and then did SEO on those pages.

    Eventually some of those images appeared in the thumbnails section of Google results, bumping off the "mug shot" image.

    For the SEO on the image pages, use the person's name as the anchor text (use whatever the search term that's bringing up the "bad" images).

    It's unlikely anyone is doing SEO on images for this person's name, so it usually doesn't take a whole lot of effort to rank the more desirable images (you're the only one doing SEO on the images).

    You can also copy one of the more desirable images, embed it on a high PR site you have control over, and then include the person's name in a text snippet on the page and in a caption of the image. That might make that version of the image appear in the thumbnails (or off to the side of search results in your case).
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    • Profile picture of the author Moneymiseh
      Thanks for your response. I will try that method hopefully it works. I am going to have to just buy a domain name for him make him a site seo the images with the url from the other site and hopefully that should do it.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    If there's one large image on the right sidebar in Google SERPs it's probably a G+ profile so you have control over that one image.

    The additional smaller images in the right sidebar can be removed by building keyword anchor-text links pointing at whatever images you would prefer to be in the Google SERP right sidebar. Those images (besides the G+ image) are usually being pulled from Google Image search & displayed in Google Text search.

    Search the celebrity name (keyword) & start at the top of Google Image search, pick the higher ranking images that aren't being displayed in Google Text search & build backlinks to those images to try & bump the negative images down Google Image search which will also remove the negative images from Google Text search.

    Piggyback off the already existing images/authority in Google SERPs. You don't need to own the positive images or the domain those images are hosted on, just build the external links.
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