Help! I need personal content removed from Google. What can I do?
 by Casey Markee

Help! I need personal content removed from Google. What can I do?

  • Recently, I ran across some personal information online regarding my old credit card. I had already canceled the card, but the card number and my billing information are still online. I contacted the webmaster and didn't get anywhere. I'm worried someone will somehow find this information and cause me a ton of problems! Help! How do I get this information removed from the search results?

Answer: In most cases, Google takes a very hands-off approach to removingkill-a-webpage.jpg content from their search results. In fact, as we have covered in our past report on Basic Search Engine Reputation Management, except for very limited circumstances, it is virtually impossible to remove results from the Google index.

Google's first advice to you would be to do what you have already done: contact the webmaster of the offending site and request they remove the content. Once this information is removed, Google will update that web page in their index during their next caching and voila, that information will be scrubbed from the web.

However, as you've already mentioned, that's not a possibility since the webmaster was uncooperative.

Fortunately for you, under the right circumstances Google will step in and provide additional assistance (i.e. remove the result for you).

These five cases are the only times when Google will intervene and remove content for you.

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