Other people’s articles are rarely the impetus for the Bytes – but I ran into a great article today that I really liked: Google won’t remove pages about you: http://tinyurl.com/aqka4s

I occasionally get calls from people wanting to have info removed from Google. Well, as Google says, they don’t own the Internet. (Though I think they’d like to.)

So what can you do? Google (http://tinyurl.com/dalm6q) suggests that you contact the web site owner and ask her to remove the content or put “don’t index” code on the site to prevent the search engines from finding the info.

If they do remove it, I suggest you submit that new page to Google immediately: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl – that will help remove the info from the Google index.

If you can’t get that info removed, you best bet is to flood the market with other info. So that the unflattering web page gets bumped from the first page of search results to the bottom of a long list. You can do that by simply creating more info on you online. Don’t link to the unflattering info though! Once you link to them you help them with the search engines.

From Google’s page it looks like they might consider action if the site you want removed includes social security and/or credit card details. Short of that you’ll have to work it out yourself.