Embarrassing Personal Information Proves Hard To Remove Online

With three real-world but anonymous examples of people who wanted identifiable and possibly perceived as negative information about themselves removed from web sites, ComputerWorld consulted experts but came up largely emptyhanded. In only one of the cases were the efforts successful, and the steps involved were complicated and time consuming. In the case of a journalist who shared a name with a reviewer on film review site Rotten Tomatoes who didn’t want their name associated with the word “Rotten,” more online activity and not less was recommended:

Apparently, the journalist’s best course of action would be to do what reputation mavens recommended in the first place: Create enough positive, search-engine-friendly content to push the “rotten + journalist’s name” search result to Google’s second page of results.

Check out our guide to using web tools to manage your online reputation. Have you ever tried to chase down a negative personal reference online, and how did it work out? Photo by Joe Goldberg