How to remove inappropriate content from the Web

There was a time when it was not considered that what you posted on the Internet would come back to haunt you in later years.

The major problem with the removal of undesirable postings is that the majority of web site owners and administrators do not know how to remove content from their websites.

If you are in the unenviable position that there are things from the past that appear when people make web searches then there are  measures you can take to have that data removed. There are companies that claim that they will do ths for you and even provide you with a "package" that will protect your on-line reputation.

However, from the research that I have done they seem to be little more than purveyors of FUD and are more interested in getting you to sign up with them than they are about actually clearing your name. The services are not inexpensive and there are rumors that underhand and bully tactics involved.

It is my opinion that you are far better off asking the people who are hosting the incriminating content to remove it. Unfortunately some of the companies are no longer in business and there are others that have a "stock in trade" of maintaining this sort of content as it attracts traffic to their website.

This is what Google say

How to determine what you can get removed

First of all you need to find all of the information that is currently available on the Internet for interested parties to find. You can do this with a bit of narcisurfing (looking for yourself on the Internet). Once you have located the "Digital Dirt" you can then see who you have to approach to have the information removed.

Determining the information that is available on you for yourself enables you to determine how relevant and what the relative ease in which the content is to be found. If the pages that contain bad things about you are hard to locate, in that you need to have a pretty good idea of what you are looking for in the fisrt place, I would not be too worried. However, if someone is determined to find out things from your past it is pretty much impossible to stop them. Even if you get the offending information removed from the hosting website it is likely to remain in the history of sites like the Wayback Machine

• Reputation Defender
• Challenge To Reputation Defender by Jarret Cohen on behalf of AutoAdmit - Sorry I didn't archive the link but this is what WikiP say about AutoAdmit   - a pity as I noted that AutoAdmit was:  "...... a particularly pugnacious web site"
• Remove a page or site from Google's search results - From Google help
• Removal of content from a website 
• How to remove false information about yourself from Google - that is if it is false