Removing Search Results and Photos from Google in 2024

October 17, 2024 9:03 AM

Somehow a relative's dinky but long-lived family website has overtaken all the top results when you search for my name on Google. These results include pictures of me from my childhood that job recruiters and fellow professionals in my industry do not need to see. What steps do I need to take to get at least some of these things removed? I also need to figure out why my website, which used to be the first result when you searched for me, has been completely scrubbed from Google.
posted by The Adventure Begins to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Can you ask the relative to take them down?
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 9:50 AM on October 17, 2024 [1 favorite]

if your websige has vanished from Google, it's likely it contained something it thought was against policy in terms in 'wrongful' search results boosting. I haven't looked into what they do now, but it used to be false SEO tricks like keyword rich text hidden in white text over a white background, unnatural use of keywords language within the page (i.e. "best seattle umbrella" repeated 200 times withought much other content), bad or damgerous off-site links to spam sites or link farms (if your website has been subtly hacked with non-obvious links added), etc.

Your site can also be shadow banned if other malicious coded sites are linking to it, so you may need to do a search for links to your site, and try to get those links removed if possible (hack sites sometimes put real links in too, to try to pretend legitamacy or something).

There used to be a way of logging into your GoogleAnalytics or similar, to see your site had been hidden, and then after fixing any potential pure SEO issues (ie SEO techniques not meant for human readers, but they wouldn't tell you what there were, you just had to know what you did wrong). Then you could submit a request for them to recrawl your site, and put you back in the listings 3 months later or something.

It could even be your website is on a shared webhost server with the same IP as a malicious site, and that could get you hidden.

But most of this knowledge above, is more than 10 years out of date and hazy at best. But hopefully may give you some ideas of how to start to get your site relisted in the G results.

Is your site still listed in things like DuckDuckGo?
posted by many-things at 10:24 AM on October 17, 2024 [1 favorite]

You could also ask your relative to at least remove the use of your full name from their site tags and image descriptions, and so just update tags to your first name or an unassociated nickname only. Assuming the site is not labelled everywhete else with the same family surname of course.

This could at least help with new content being assigned, and updated recrawls, but I don't know how effective it'll be at removing old assigned images from search results with 'what it already knows to be you'.

Hopefully someone else can reply with more helpful info though!
posted by many-things at 10:34 AM on October 17, 2024 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Can you ask the relative to take them down?'

I am asking them to take down the section of the site that has to do with me, but I think any images that Google has trawled and populated will stay in results for a while.
posted by The Adventure Begins at 10:43 AM on October 17, 2024

Best answer: Once the relative removes the page (or makes it private) you can notify Google using the Remove Outdated Content Tool and they will remove it from their results.
posted by zippy at 12:55 PM on October 17, 2024 [6 favorites]

Best answer: Also, I used to do search ranking optimization (white hat stuff, not spammy) and if you're willing to share your website in a private message, I may be able to say why it isn't showing.

There are multiple reasons, ranging from things Google deems spammy, to the site being challenging to parse, to even just being down the last time Google's crawler tried to fetch it.
posted by zippy at 1:02 PM on October 17, 2024 [1 favorite]

Best answer: It is difficult to say why your site is not showing up in google search results without looking at it. A good place to start would be to set up your site with Google's search console - it will give you information about indexing, and any problems that might be occurring.
posted by kaefer at 10:03 AM on October 18, 2024

It's possible that the site is showing up higher in the algo just for you, because you've clicked it before. Might make you feel better to try searching from a friend's or public computer to see how it's ranked for a first-time searcher.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 4:41 PM on October 18, 2024

Response by poster: Good news. My relative took down the page in its entirety and I was able to use the Remove Outdated Content Tool to pull images. My website is now showing up as the first result, so nature is healing.

Thank you all for your help. The images weren't bad, just goofy pictures from teenage blunder years, but they weren't adding anything good to my professional web presence.
posted by The Adventure Begins at 11:52 AM on October 24, 2024