Earlier today the European Union court ruled that Google must remove links from it’s search engine that people find objectionable. What does this mean for reputation management? Will it kill reputation management by making it easier for people to manage their reputation online?

The Ruling May Affect Reputation Management

It’s certainly too early to tell, however our guess is that it will actually help the reputation management industry. To understand why, it’s worth reviewing how reputation management or reverse SEO works. Today, in order to remove content from the Google index, you have to persuade the website owner to remove it. This is difficult. Most webmasters do not feel the need, even under legal action, to remove content. They feel even less if the news is true. However, what happens if the event happened ten years ago? Google prefers content that is new. It’s possible to hide bad content because Google will rank new content ahead of old. This is how reputation management works. You create new content that moves the old content to page 2 of Google where only 5% of people go. Then, fewer people see the negative content. The farther you push the results back, the less likely people will find the bad news.

Google will need to make some changes if they intend to move forward. People must be able to submit links they don’t want in searches. We would envision this would be something similar to Google’s tool that allows you to tell the search engine that links to your site should not be counted (the disavow tool) and tools to tell Google people have scraped your content and are using it on their site. In order to verify that Google will identify you as the person identified in the links, they will most likely require using a Google + or other verified source to prove you are who you say you are to remove the bad content.

Possible Complications

Where things will get interesting, is when Google will deem links to be legitimate and relevant and when they will not. For example, Tiger Wood’s indiscretions may be considered relevant for as long as he is relevant in history, while someone who committed a crime or declared bankruptcy, may have more luck removing those links from Google. The bottom line is that client who need reputation management services will need a company with a specific skill set. Further, clients that have had real news worthy events, will need more traditional reputation management services as Google will consider those links relevant and available in their index.