How do I remove myself from the search engines?

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What if you have an attorney contact the owner of the site? Would they remove it before I spend a few hundred for legal fees?

Leo is right (I assume that was an answer from Leo). I work with quite a few law firms and requests pile in quite often - people want to sue teen agers for posting bad info about their kids on myspace, obviously classic ripoffreport and scam.com examples... Legally, these problems get nowhere... And by the way, which attorney is it that you're speaking of that charges a few hundred? :) At minimum, this problem will cost you $250/hr. and might take weeks if not months to negotiate... We're talking about thousands and tens of thousands in legal fees. So, I'd say the three websites you could review for alternative ways to help with this problem are: www.reputation-technologies.com, www.zallas.com and www.cleanmy.name , last one being quite inexpensive, but I haven't tried it, so can't say if it works.

Legal is not the way to go here... Even if you get a court order to take the negative info down, which is very unlikely, it is still not guaranteed that you'd get the negative link off of google... although I guess you could take the same court order to google then and see if they remove it.

On a related matter: it's a good move, when the phone company gives you a 'new' telephone number, to google it and see if it's secondhand. I was getting lots of calls from catering companies and soon found out that my number had once been used by a visitor centre up the road, and was listed in various online business directories!

And how is this related? :)

We're talking about removing a name from Google... If you have a phone number listed all over, and you don't want it listed, contact the owner of the site to remove it. If they don't do it, use www.reputation-technologies.com and they'll get it off first 5-10 pages at least.

Depending on the size of the site, the site owner can remove individual links or entries from many of the search engines. I have a site that I did not want showing up in the search engines. As the site owner, it was very easy to have Google remove all links to it. They were gone in three days time and it was all automated. If the site is small enough, you might be able to get them to make a similar request for entries with your information - chances are they wont, but you could always give it a try. Not all of the search sites are as helpful, and your best hopes would be for removal from the biggest few.

I have been researching with all of the companies that have been in the business of cleaning names on search engines but only one of them had really removed my name from the SE's and my negative link was published at ROR(rip-of-report) and many I have contacted and hired but only http://www.reputationengineer.com/ removed it and cleared my name within the first 2 months of the 6 months contract. And had a clear profile online with applying with companies have been a breeze with no problems.

Jennifer, reputation Engineer is a ripoff and you might be fraud too - how could they have done what you are saying they have done if they only registered their website 6 days ago?! LOL and their website just sucks...

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/reputationengineer.com

Do your homework people!

I agree with what Joanne said, I also used the http://Reputation-Technologies.com and I would strongly recommend them. Like what Leo said, there really is no answer to removing your name from google. But the next best thing is to at least get the negative stuff about you off the first search results page of Google and into the succeeding pages where it they will be less noticeable. This is what http://Reputation-Technologies.com did for me so I'm pretty sure they can help you guys out too.

I was checking-out some of the earlier comments. I read that mike mentioned www.cleanmy.name which i used. since he hasn't used this service, i would like him to know that it is not only inexpensive but also effective. The package I took was the $49/mo.

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