For months now I have been desperately trying to win back my own name. Somehow, some time ago my name must have been added to one or more spammer's index terms.
Now when I search for my full name (Brendan Boehr) on Google I get 257 hits, of which roughly 90% are pure, unmitigated spam. See for yourself. It's the same story with Yahoo (308 hits) and, to a lesser extent, MSN search (62 hits).
I've been actively reporting the sites to their host domains (e.g., freehostingz.com, 0catch.com, fr33webhost.com, mycyberway.com, etc., etc.). In this way a few of the pages have been removed (but are still indexed for the moment, apparently). I have also reported many or all of these sites to Google - at first I did this manually using Google's spam report page, and then I started using the excellent Spam Report Firefox Plugin.
I feel like I'm fighting a hopeless battle. I don't want potential employers, associates or peers to find only misleading spam should they Google my name. My name is itself pretty rare (I have never discovered a single other "Brendan Boehr") so why it would be a spam target is beyond me.
Does anyone have any advice? Is there anything more I can do? Is my case hopeless? Is there a way to get Google to care about my problem?
Re: Google spam
Unfortunately, I'm not sure if there's anything you can do besides reporting the spam sites to Google. I certainly know what you mean, I've had companies push their software to unsuspecting users by buying Google ads using my name as a keyword... not really nice.
Do you have a website? If
Do you have a website? If so, maybe I could link to your home page from some of my sites to see if I could get you a better google rank or something.
I do indeed have a website
Thanks Rob! I know that increasing my Google Rank isn't a permanent solution, but having a better rank may win most of the battle.
I have a blog that i started just recently. If you'll please excuse the blatant attempt to boost my search ranking, click here: Brendan Boehr. There isn't much content there yet but i intend to post frequently whenever i have time (which is not right now).
There is also a website that i made a few years ago for my father, who's a home designer and watercolor artist - Bruce Boehr at http://www.prairiescapesonline.com (the website is kind of crude, but i didn't know what i was doing back then. I like it anyways :). I should probably include my name somewhere on that site...
And thanks to Sami as well. I appreciate the feedback. If anyone comes up with more potential solutions i would love to know. I'll spread the word too.
Google United Kingdom show WOT ratings
Firefox 2.0.0.12 and WOT plug in
I'm a Googler
Hi
I am a big fan of Google. Google UK is set as my home page. Since I down loaded the Firefox plug in WOT for Firefox 2.0.0.12 I have found that Google displays the WOT rating on every page. It's great just like a traffic light, Red for Stop, Yellow for caution and Green for go. I have two web sites of my own one has been rated as a good site (Green) and the other has a question mark against it as unrated, I do hope that this will also change to a Green for good web site in the near future. My partner In North Yorkshire has a web design web site that has a question mark against it so I have introduced him to Firefox 2.0.0.12 and the WOT plug in.
Antony
A Perkin Web Design
A WOT user for three weeks
Internet Search Settings
Hi Antony,
It's interesting which sites tend to show up with warnings and which don't. Sometimes the warnings don't seem to be descriptive at all, unfortunately. I guess only WOT users can rate websites. Yesterday i was reading about the whole "anonymous vs. Scientology" phenomenon and i noticed that nearly every official Church of Scientology had low WOT safety ratings.
Brendan