This is an issue that has been in the news this week. Google now have a “Right To Be Forgotten” form you can fill in if your name or business is being associated with old and detrimental search results.

For example if your company was sued for defamation and these results started showing up, once you’ve won the case (because you wouldn’t defame anyone or anything) your website/company/name could still be associated with that case.

What makes it worse is Google Autocomplete. For example, If you start typing in “company name”, Google could suggest “Company name gets sued”, “Company name defamation case”. Not the best for your business if you’ve successfully won your case and your name doesn’t deserve to be associated with those searches.

To combat these results you can fill out a “Right to Forget” form and Google could remove results associated with these bad results if they deem it’s in the public’s interest.

If they do indeed honour your request and remove those results, they could still mark that they’ve removed results from the SERPs. News of this comes from The Guardian that says they understand that this will be the case.

What do you think?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey