A new word that has captured a lot of attention recently is “googleganger” – from “Google” plus “doppelganger.” A Googleganger is someone else with the same name as you who shows up in Google searches.
Of course this brings up an important point.
Commercially significant Google searches aren’t just for companies and products and the like. They are also for individuals.
Many is the person who “egosurfing” for what’s the Internet’s take on themselves, finds they have the same name as an adult video star. Or probably worse, that someone has false, negative information about you on their website – and it comes up high in a search.
The good is news is something can be done about it. Lawsuits are expensive, take a long time, are uncertain of result – and by then, you could have 90 new pages saying “Joe says Fred is bad.”
But with some work, you can drive the negative material off of page one by getting other pages that have nice or just anything true about you, showing up with high search engine rankings.
It can take a while for these other pages to get up the search engine rankings, but it often isn’t difficult to do.
