Google shows my company as "delinquent". It's not. Reindex soon please!!
February 17, 2022 9:52 PM Subscribe
I just found out that if you search for my name or the name of my consulting firm in a certain way, the top result is from this very sketchy site that says MY COMPANY LLC is delinquent. It's the first thing you see. My company was administratively delinquent on purpose. I fixed it but now I have to wait for Google to reindex this website. I don't think it's possible, I thought I'd ask, but can I speed this reindexing process up with Google?
I'm a little stressed over this. Some of you may remember me asking quite a few questions about challenges I have been having over the last year with job interviews. I hired an interview coach, have a new presentation and had a really great interview with a top consulting firm in my field. I was walking on air and waiting for the email to schedule my next Zoom interview when I received an email asking about certain details regarding my personal consulting firm, MY COMPANY LLC. Another company in Singapore has the same name that MY COMPANY LLC does business as, so I clarified that and it was no big deal except that I had purposely let the LLC lapse last year for certain reasons and I now know that it is very visible online and that the term used is delinquent.
I'm in Colorado in the United States by the way.
I hadn't done so in a while, but I googled MY COMPANY LLC and included more details than most would do and the top result was from this website www.colorado-corp.com in which the link to their website featuring my page says - MY COMPANY, LLC, Delinquent August 18, 2020. That's not a good look and it sounds like a financial problem, which it wasn't, it was an administrative delinquency because I didn't refile my annual paperwork.
I called The Colorado Secretary of State and they knew of the website and others like it that scraped public data and relisted it on the internet, while it might be something seemingly sketchy, there was nothing illegal. I filed the paperwork to reactivate the company and the State of Colorado updated my status within minutes. I suspected that the dubious website would be another issue that wouldn't be resolved any time soon because of course there is no way to contact them except by sending a message through their website. I wasn't ready to go direct to them yet.
I thought that I would have heard back about my next interview today but got nothing. I Googled my company again and the top search result still shows my company's status as delinquent but when I clicked on the link, I was surprised to see that this sketchy website updated my company status to "in good standing" within 24 hours.
I spent over three hours this evening trying to find a way to get Google to reindex the website so the word delinquent is not the first search result but in the past you could make a request to Google to reindex a website you don't own but now it looks like you can only do so for a website that you do own. With that said, depending on the traffic any given website gets it's probably a minimum of four days before they recrawl a website and up to several months. I think that I'm out of luck and will have to wait it out until Google gets around to this website again.
I'm concerned that this information is out there. It's possible that it may have caused me problems in my job search or might in the future or even worse the present. This is not something that has ever come up under any self searches I have done prior to this week. I know this current company is doing their due diligence and does it well so I'd like to get this search result updated ASAP. Is there anything I can do to speed Google up?
Funny tangent: I tracked this company back as far as I thought it was reasonable. It turns out that the www.colorado-corp.com domain is owned by some other company that I tracked back through several other domain addresses to a physical address in Phoenix, AZ, and a New York state telephone number. Both the address and phone number are associated with super sketchy stuff such as a vape company selling overly carcinogenic marijuana products, a possible puppy mill, a botox company, bitcoin scams, palm reading and a few more. Oh, I forgot, the phone number and address are also attached to a real estate company owned by Paolo Coehlo, hahahahaha.
I'm a little stressed over this. Some of you may remember me asking quite a few questions about challenges I have been having over the last year with job interviews. I hired an interview coach, have a new presentation and had a really great interview with a top consulting firm in my field. I was walking on air and waiting for the email to schedule my next Zoom interview when I received an email asking about certain details regarding my personal consulting firm, MY COMPANY LLC. Another company in Singapore has the same name that MY COMPANY LLC does business as, so I clarified that and it was no big deal except that I had purposely let the LLC lapse last year for certain reasons and I now know that it is very visible online and that the term used is delinquent.
I'm in Colorado in the United States by the way.
I hadn't done so in a while, but I googled MY COMPANY LLC and included more details than most would do and the top result was from this website www.colorado-corp.com in which the link to their website featuring my page says - MY COMPANY, LLC, Delinquent August 18, 2020. That's not a good look and it sounds like a financial problem, which it wasn't, it was an administrative delinquency because I didn't refile my annual paperwork.
I called The Colorado Secretary of State and they knew of the website and others like it that scraped public data and relisted it on the internet, while it might be something seemingly sketchy, there was nothing illegal. I filed the paperwork to reactivate the company and the State of Colorado updated my status within minutes. I suspected that the dubious website would be another issue that wouldn't be resolved any time soon because of course there is no way to contact them except by sending a message through their website. I wasn't ready to go direct to them yet.
I thought that I would have heard back about my next interview today but got nothing. I Googled my company again and the top search result still shows my company's status as delinquent but when I clicked on the link, I was surprised to see that this sketchy website updated my company status to "in good standing" within 24 hours.
I spent over three hours this evening trying to find a way to get Google to reindex the website so the word delinquent is not the first search result but in the past you could make a request to Google to reindex a website you don't own but now it looks like you can only do so for a website that you do own. With that said, depending on the traffic any given website gets it's probably a minimum of four days before they recrawl a website and up to several months. I think that I'm out of luck and will have to wait it out until Google gets around to this website again.
I'm concerned that this information is out there. It's possible that it may have caused me problems in my job search or might in the future or even worse the present. This is not something that has ever come up under any self searches I have done prior to this week. I know this current company is doing their due diligence and does it well so I'd like to get this search result updated ASAP. Is there anything I can do to speed Google up?
Funny tangent: I tracked this company back as far as I thought it was reasonable. It turns out that the www.colorado-corp.com domain is owned by some other company that I tracked back through several other domain addresses to a physical address in Phoenix, AZ, and a New York state telephone number. Both the address and phone number are associated with super sketchy stuff such as a vape company selling overly carcinogenic marijuana products, a possible puppy mill, a botox company, bitcoin scams, palm reading and a few more. Oh, I forgot, the phone number and address are also attached to a real estate company owned by Paolo Coehlo, hahahahaha.
By accessing that page you may have forced Google to reindex your name. If not, do it a couple times from different accounts and IP may help.
posted by kschang at 11:20 PM on February 17, 2022
posted by kschang at 11:20 PM on February 17, 2022
You can poke around in the Google Search Console to get Google to re-index your site. You have to confirm ownership by matching your account to the google analytics tag on your site (assuming you use that...?), but once you do, you can request a re-indexing and do other things that can improve search performance.
posted by entropone at 5:24 AM on February 18, 2022
posted by entropone at 5:24 AM on February 18, 2022
…if you search for my name or the name of my consulting firm in a certain way…
… I googled MY COMPANY LLC and included more details than most would do …
If you only search for your company name, does this search result appear high up in the results? If not, I wouldn’t worry about it. Really.
I mean, it’s impossible for us to know how likely it is for someone else to enter the magic combination that reveals this result, because we don’t know what the combination is… but maybe, if every other search result about your company is fine, and this ONE, which is revealed with a specific set of search terms, isn’t… you should let it go?
posted by fabius at 5:55 AM on February 18, 2022 [2 favorites]
… I googled MY COMPANY LLC and included more details than most would do …
If you only search for your company name, does this search result appear high up in the results? If not, I wouldn’t worry about it. Really.
I mean, it’s impossible for us to know how likely it is for someone else to enter the magic combination that reveals this result, because we don’t know what the combination is… but maybe, if every other search result about your company is fine, and this ONE, which is revealed with a specific set of search terms, isn’t… you should let it go?
posted by fabius at 5:55 AM on February 18, 2022 [2 favorites]
People let single person LLCs lapse all the time. Unless you're saying that you're still doing business as the lapsed LLC, if a company cares about this, you probably don't want to work for them. I suspect that if there's a hold up on your application that's it's unrelated to this but that as this is the only data point you have, that it's easy to focus on it.
All that said, I'm not aware of any way to get Google to reindex a site that you don't have control over but they tend to be pretty aggressive in their spidering so it's probably not going to be that long.
posted by Candleman at 7:44 AM on February 18, 2022 [2 favorites]
All that said, I'm not aware of any way to get Google to reindex a site that you don't have control over but they tend to be pretty aggressive in their spidering so it's probably not going to be that long.
posted by Candleman at 7:44 AM on February 18, 2022 [2 favorites]
I also don't think this is a big deal. I've missed LLC filing deadlines.... multiple times. And I am pretty organized when it comes to that stuff. Anyone who actually cares would go to the Secretary of State website and look up your LLC information that way, not some random sketchy site that comes up under a specific search term.
posted by bradbane at 11:17 AM on February 18, 2022
posted by bradbane at 11:17 AM on February 18, 2022
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by virve at 9:58 PM on February 17, 2022