Removing Information from Google

A frequently asked question among web users is how they can remove information from Google’s search results. There are many reasons people might want to have information removed from search results, including concerns over the publishing of their persona and confidential information, copyright infringement, negative publicity, or embarrassing photos or videos posted to social networking sites.

It is important to note that in most cases, Google is unable to remove content from the web as they are not the publishers of the content; they just index content published elsewhere via their search engine.  So, in short, it is very difficult to get Google to remove content unless it has been published by a company they control, such as a YouTube video infringing copyright, or an image of you and your house on Street View that infringes your privacy.

There is a distinction to be made over whether the information you are trying to remove from Google has been published on your own website, on a website belonging to Google, or on a third party website. The ease with which you can have information removed will very much depend on who has published it, and whether any laws have been infringed. It is important to note that people are for the most part free to publish whatever they like as long as they are not breaking any laws. However, there are always some steps you can take to try to rectify the situation, as we will see below.

Removing content from your own website from Google Search Results

Having Google remove information published on your own website from their search engine listings is considerably more straightforward than removing content published by someone else. Under normal circumstances, website owners want as many pages from their site to be indexed in order to improve their search engine rankings. However there may be times where you need to have content removed from the public domain, perhaps for copyright purposes or due to a breach of data protection laws.

Thankfully, Google offers a content removal service that allows you to remove pages, cached pages, images and even entire site directories from their search results. However, using these tools is not an instant solution; it will take some time for the content to be removed. When you specify the URLs to be removed, Google will remove them from the list of sites crawled by their spiders. The next time Google crawl your site, the specified URL will be omitted from the crawl, and when the index is updated the URL will no longer appear in search results.  As a result, if you urgently need something removed (for example if sensitive information such as credit card details has been accidentally exposed) you should use Google’s urgent URL removal tool, which will help expedite the process.

A more comprehensive look at removing your own content from Google – and crucially, how to prevent information you want to keep private from ending up in Google search results in the first place – can be found in this useful article from searchengineland.com.

Removing content from Google’s search results that has been published by a third party

It is important to remember that Google does not (for the most part) publish the information displayed in their search results. As a result, even if you are successful in removing content from the search results, it will still be available elsewhere on the web. The best course of action to take in this situation is to contact the webmaster of the site in question, and ask them to remove the offending material. Google’s guide to contacting a webmasterprovides some useful tips on how to do this.

If the webmaster refuses and the content comprises a breach of copyright, is in breach of data protection laws, includes libellous information or breaks the law in some other way, you can take legal action against the owners of the website.  Once the information has been taken down, the next time Google crawls the site, the information will drop out of the index and will no longer appear in the search results. To be on the safe side, once this has been done you should also request that Google removes cached versions of the web page from their search results. This will ensure that the old version of the page does not remain available to the public.

In the case of serious cases of confidential breaches of information appearing in search results, Google will consider your request to remove a third party URL from the search engine listings, however the number of cases where this is applicable is small, and is limited to the following:

• Social security or government ID numbers
• An image of your signature
• Bank account or credit card details
• Your business name, or both your first name and surname are appearing in adult content sites that are spamming the search results.

It should be noted that while this will remove the information in question from Google’s search results, it will still be available elsewhere on the web unless you can get the webmaster to remove it, as described above.

Protecting your private social networking profiles from appearing on search engines

If you are a user of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, you should be aware that in certain cases, your private information and photos could be being made available to the public via search engines.  To protect your personal information, it is important that you familiarise yourself with the privacy settings of any social networking site that you use, and ensure that you select the appropriate options to prevent your private information from being crawled by search engines such as Google. The Facebook Help Center provides comprehensive information on how this can be done, and other social networks have their own guidance on how to keep your information secure. Once you have carefully followed these steps to ensure that your data is secure, the information will in time drop out of the Google search results via the normal process of crawling and re-indexing.

Removing content published by Google

As mentioned previously, Google has limited ability to remove content from the web as they do not own the majority of web content. However, as their business diversifies into other areas, they have increasingly become publishers of information as well as indexers of that information. Google businesses that publish content include YouTube, Google +, Street View, Google Earth, Blogger and many more. See this useful form for a comprehensive list of Google services and how to start the process of having information removed.  Google will usually only consider a content removal request if it involves a legal issue, such as breach of copyright or defamation, however global legal issues surrounding online content are complex, and vary from country to country. The Google Transparency Report provides details of action taken to remove content from Google services in various countries around the world. There is also some useful information there about copyright removal requests submitted to Google.

Removing negative publicity from Google

With the huge growth in blogging and community review websites in recent years, if you are a business owner it is very likely that somebody somewhere will post a negative review, or comments about your business that you don’t agree with and would rather was not in the public domain. Unfortunately, as we have seen above, unless the information is actually libellous or defamatory, there is little you can do to actually have this content removed from search engine results. However such negative comments can often be incredibly damaging to a business, or to an individual so what can you do to combat this?

In the past, many large companies have tried (and failed) to manage negative comments posted online via social media by attempting to censor the information, resulting in huge PR disasters and even more negative publicity for the company. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Nestlé’s failed attempt to censor criticism via their Facebook page, following Greenpeace’s use of an altered version of their logo to highlight the alleged use of unsustainable palm oil in production of its products. There is a wealth of information on this case and other high-profile social media disasters online – typing ‘Social Media Fail’ into Google will give you a wealth of information on similar cases.

Most companies experience negative feedback on a much smaller scale than this; however it can still be incredibly damaging. As a result of these cases, accepted good practice today is not to add fuel to the fire by attempting to censor the negative information, as this is likely to backfire and cause further damage to your reputation.

Instead, it is recommended that you try to ‘drown-out’ the negative comments by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If this positive information can outperform the negative in Google’s search results, it should reduce the effects of the bad publicity.

Google has written a useful blog post about managing your image online with a series of steps you can follow to attempt to turn the situation around, including having regular customers post positive information, and creating a Google account and filling your profile with information that you want people to see.