Google Hell and PayPal Sucks

Posted by admin on October 28th, 2007 filed in General

We should sit down and tell sad tales of misplaced Google rankings and wrong websites. Imagine there is a website out there that contains some data about you that is wrong or perhaps just not very nice or worse, deeply shaming. And then imagine how yoru life would if that site came up third or second or even first on Google every time someone searched your name. Quelle horror!

A good example is what happens when you Google for “Paypal” who are always number one but ‘PayPal Sucks’ is always number 2. And while we can imagine that PayPal are big enough to take it on the chin you can imagine how destructive that would be if paypal was a small company and couldn’t afford to lose the customers that the ‘sucks’ site would scare away.

And another case, dearer to my heart, a brilliant yoga teacher and bodyworker, Jules Paxton, whose Google ranking is skewered by the unfounded reference to a news story that screams “Guru charged in Assault Case.” Yet the charges were dismissed against Jules Paxton

You can read about it here: Jules Paxton – Aspen Charges dismissed

But here’s the killer:

The only media story put out about the charges being dismissed wasn’t properly indexed in Google. But you could find in Lycos!

So the original, false charges that came to nothing haunt Jules Paxton at the top of the results – and the truth isn’t even in the results! How mad is that!

(Probably that has changed since I’ve posted this and Google has indexed the page about the case being dismissed against Jules Paxton)

Anyway the whole thing is called ‘Reputation Management’. I would say it’s a bit of a nightmare because most people will ‘Google you’. And suppose I had done something stupid twenty years ago…or someone had some awful lie up there about me…. I don’t like it. There should be a way to appeal and see change.