Oops -- I didn't mean to permanently associate a NSFW image with my business email...

October 24, 2010 3:17 PM

Oops -- I didn't mean to permanently associate a NSFW image with my business email...

I own a domain -- let's call it MyDomain.com. I use it for business email but nothing else. My husband once had an anonymous NSFW blog on an entirely unrelated domain. In this blog, several years ago, he linked to one image stored on MyDomain.com's servers.

One lone blog picked up the image with the source URL. The result is that if you do a google search for MyDomain.com, one of the first and only results is the image on that blog, which also links to hubby's NSFW blog.

I'd rather not have that image, and my husband's blog, associated with the email address I'm using. The image is no longer on MyDomain.com's servers, but it's shown loud and clear on that one blog.

The blog that linked the image is long defunct. Reaching out to the owners and politely asking whether they can help has not had any results so far. I don't even know whether they're still checking that email address. What else can we do?

For example, is there any ethical way to flood the search results with boring and nonmeaningful MyDomain.com results to the point where the offending result won't show up until several pages in?

Or is there another way to neutralize this link?

posted by ROTFL to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

If it's a single image and nothing more, I think I'd go the plausible denial route and just claim that you know nothing about it. Add a few more filler pages you MyDomain like maybe a resume and other business-y links and assume it's a done deal. Hubby no longer maintains that blog and there is nothing on that old blog with his name on it, right? Adding to this, if you have a blog at that address and use tags for a few posts, even if it's only a few posts, you wind up with a ton of URLs at MyDomain.com like

MyDomain.com/blog/tag/business
MyDomain.com/blog/tag/iamseriousbusinessperson

which would pretty quickly fill up Google assuming they were linked to by other people in legitimate ways. If the link-up between MyDomain and hubby's NSFW blog was several years ago, it's totally possible that you didn't even own the domain at that time or that you had a shared host and that this is a mixup. Unless the image is some sort of really borderline illegal thing, I'd just deny, set up a ten-post blog with tagas/categories/archives etc and just consider it a done deal.
posted by jessamyn at 3:32 PM on October 24, 2010 [6 favorites]

You can get google to flush the offending entry if you're the copyright holder of the image. You'll have to dig around in their rules on indexing, but I am pretty certain you can do this.

I maybe got a bit lost in your examples. Did the other blog just say "This picture originally found on..." Otherwise I'm not seeing how it's indexed as yours.
posted by cjorgensen at 3:59 PM on October 24, 2010

I use it for business email but nothing else.

Put a website up there and add some content. The old link will quickly fade into the depths of googleness.
posted by alms at 4:18 PM on October 24, 2010

If the other blog hotlinked to the image, replacing the image with another, innocuous one, might work. I.e. use exactly the same url for the new image, and then wait a few weeks.
posted by lollusc at 4:35 PM on October 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'll second what lollusc said: upload a new image and save it with the same name as the offending image. I've done that with stolen images a lot. A lot of people hotlink my photos.
posted by ChefJoAnna at 5:57 PM on October 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

In fact, something awful used to do that opposite of that pretty regularly (replace innocuous hotlinked images with goatse.
posted by empath at 5:29 AM on October 25, 2010