Restoring a Personal Brand: A De-Indexing & Takedown Strategy
Client: A high-profile C-suite executive in the financial services (YMYL) industry.
Challenges We Faced
The client was a respected expert, but their personal search results were damaging their credibility:
Old Negative Content
An old, irrelevant mugshot from 15 years ago (for a charge that was dropped) was ranking on Page 1 from a “data broker” site.
Damaging Personal Brand
This was damaging their E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust) and credibility in the YMYL space.
Violated Google Policy
The content was a clear violation of Google’s new “outdated or removed personal information” policies.
Unresponsive Webmasters
The “mugshot” sites were predatory and unresponsive.
No SERP Suppression Assets
There were no optimized personal brand pages, authoritative profiles, or positive content ranking to push the outdated mugshot off page one, allowing a single predatory result to dominate branded search results.
Control Your Personal Brand
“Is a negative search result (like a mugshot or old article) hurting your career? Our De-Indexing & Legal Requests service can help.”
Our Approach – How We Solved These Challenges
Comprehensive Reputation Audit
We identified all 5 URLs (from 3 different “mugshot” sites) featuring the damaging, outdated content.
Strategic Removal Plan
We determined that suppression would be too slow and that the content qualified for direct removal.
Direct Removal & Takedowns
We contacted the 3 “mugshot” sites directly. Two were unresponsive, but one removed the content after a formal legal request from our team.
De-Indexing & Legal Requests
For the two unresponsive sites, we filed a De-Indexing request with Google directly, citing their policy on “personally identifiable information” and “outdated content.”
Results
| Metric | Before | After | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Negative URLs (Page 1 for Name) | 2 | 0 | -100% |
| URLs Successfully De-Indexed/Removed | 0 | 5 | +5 URLs |
| Negative Sentiment (Brandwatch) | 45% | <5% | -88.8% |
Free Personal SERP Analysis
“Google your name. Don’t like what you see? Book a Free, Confidential Consultation with our negative content removal experts!”
Advice for Marketers & Brand Owners
- You can remove negative google search results if they violate a platform’s TOS or Google’s specific removal policies.
- Direct Removal & Takedowns (contacting the webmaster) is always the first step.
- De-Indexing via Google’s tools is your powerful second step if the webmaster is unresponsive.
- This is a highly specialized service. Do not try to DIY legal takedowns; partner with a negative content removal company.
Extra Factors That Made It Work
- This was a De-Indexing & Legal Requests-focused campaign, not a suppression one.
- Knowing the exact Google policy to cite in our de-indexing request was the key to getting it approved.
- Using Google Alerts to monitor for any new instances of the content popping up.
