When we Google ourselves or our businesses, the results aren't always what we were expecting. If negative or private, we might wonder how we can get this information out of the public eye. Fortunately, there are steps that can be taken.
To illustrate how these work, think of yourself as being inside a building and the internet being the landscape outside that building. Google is the window; it monitors and offers you a portal to show you what’s going on outside.
Google’s job is simply to report what it sees - it doesn’t want to jeopardise this by being inaccurate. So, if you want Google to change its report, there are two main routes you could take:
The simplest method is to actively change the landscape outside; or rather change the content on the internet.
If you have control over content this is by far the best option, since you don’t have to convince Google to do anything other than its usual task of monitoring.
To do this either:
To complete the process, you’ll need to ask Google to re-crawl / reindex the page. Don’t worry if these terms are unfamiliar - the concept is quite simple.
The internet is so vast Google couldn't possibly have the time to scan absolutely everything before giving you your results (which will be in a few milliseconds of your request). To combat this problem, Google scans the landscape all the time - to try and keep its overall picture as accurate as possible. The results you get back will reflect the landscape last scanned by Google.
This scanning is called crawling - so asking Google to re-crawl a specific page means asking it to take a look at the part of the landscape where your now hidden or removed content was before. Google will take note of the fact that something has changed, and so update its overall picture.
If you don’t do this, you will have to wait for the next time Google is scheduled to look at your part of the landscape (which often takes a while).
If you are in control of the content you want removed, this should be a nice, simple process. However, if someone else controls the content you want removed it is a little more complicated.
The best method would be to try and request that the content owner removes / hides the offending content. If they do this, you can then use the same removal tool to request Google to re-crawl the page.
If the content you are trying to remove falls into one of a select few categories of sensitive personal information, you may be able to take a different route. These categories include:
You can request that Google ignores certain content when scanning the landscape where this content can be found. However, this is not ideal since the content is still there and could therefore still be accessed in ways not affected by Google search - but it can sometimes help a lot.
Follow the procedure on Google’s information removal tool, selecting the Remove information you see in Google Search and then In Google's search results and on a website.
We hope that the procedures discussed in this article help give you some more privacy online. If you have any issues regarding this topic, please do comment below to get in touch.