You Can't Fight Google

I had a funny but poignant phone call today.

A woman was looking for a piece of advice. It seems that when you google her name and the word Minneapolis, the first item that Google returns is her name and the year of her birth, listed on a family tree site. It's a genealogy site about one of her ancestors (done by a distant cousin, I guess), even though she was not aware of the ancestor's existence.

Her own "real" links are ranked below this funky link, and she wanted to know what she could do to change it.

Not much, I said. All you can do is try to outcompete the genealogy site by getting more sites to link to your site, so that Google will rank your site more highly. Even then, it won't keep the link from appearing on the first page, just maybe move it out of the top spot. But if anyone has a better suggestion, I'd love to send it to her.

I imagine this type of thing happens all the time, though.

It's an odd thing to be at the mercy of a search engine; my caller is lucky that it's something as innocuous as a genealogy site, even though it gives away her age. For the younger generations, it's more likely to be a site with pictures of them doing something they later regretted.