If you have been involved in the internet industry for a reasonable amount of time, chances are there are a few web pages about you, or that mention you. Matt Cutts from Google discussed on his blog that he’ll get an email from time to time with people requesting Google remove certain pages from their index mostly because there is something bad about them on it. Unfortunately there’s not any way to remove a web page out of Google’s indexing.

Cutts gets these emails so often, he has came up with a standard response to copy and paste into his reply emails.

Unfortunately there’s not much I can do. The page you pointed out is not spam, and pretty much the only removals (at least in the U.S., which is what I know about) that we do for legal reasons are if a court orders us. We typically say that if person A doesn’t like a webpage B, only removing page B out of Google’s search results doesn’t do any good because webpage B is still there (e.g. it can be found by going to it directly or through other search engines). In that sense, the presence of that page in Google’s index is just reflecting the fact that the page exists on the wider web.

The best actions for you from our perspective can be one of a couple options. Either contact whoever put up webpage B and convince them to modify or to take the page down. Or if the page is doing something against the law, get a court to agree with you and force webpage B to be removed or changed. We really don’t want to be taking sides in a he-said/she-said dispute, so that’s why we typically say “Get the page fixed, changed, or removed on the web and then Google will update our index with those changes the next time that we crawl that page.” Our policies outside the U.S. might be different; I’m not as familiar with how legal stuff works outside the U.S.

If you are familiar with Ron James, the owner of the NamePros forums, he once had a thread on DNForum made about him telling lies about him, as well as disclosing a lot of personal information about him, such has his name, his wife’s name, his address, etc. He got lucky because DNForum found and closed the thread, as well as made sure they deleted the content in it. But had DNForum left the content up, Google would have came along, indexed the thread, and people would google Ron James and find all of this made up boloney about him.

P.S. For anyone who wants to comment, I fixed the comment system. I finally figured out why no one was commenting So I would love to hear your comments!