The “Real” Devin Downey

It’s been about nine months since I’ve actually posted anything here. My goal was to get the number one ranking in Google for “Devin Downey”, so once I achieved that ranking, I quickly lost interest in writing. I certainly don’t consider myself much of a writer.

After a quick scan of the search engines,  I discovered that I have achieved at least a number two ranking in all of the majors (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask), so this blog has served its purpose. I’ve also managed to secure seven out of the top ten rankings on Google for “Devin Downey” with content on sites like Linked In, Classmates and Naymz.

Now I am wondering if I can work in the opposite direction. How long would it take to pull a search engine “houdini”? I recently read an article on “How to be unGoogleable“. It’s not really a new concept, as people have wanted to hide from visibility for quite some time. I once worked on a corporate account that acquired a negative site dedicated to hating their corporation. It was called (insert their Corporation’s name) ____ sucks.com.  My team’s task was to de-optimize it. It took about three months before you couldn’t find any trace of it. Ask.com held on the longest with a thumbnail in their search results page that continued to display the image of the page that had not existed for three months.

De-optimization can be done with time, provided you own the content. You can even keep the content live and indexed on your site, but apply no follow tags for the search engines to de-optmize the content. But what do you do when you don’t own the content? Since you “rent” some of your content space typically, in my case on Linked In, Classmates and Naymz, you can log onto those sites and wipe your profiles clean by deleting your account. I’m guessing that would take a month or two to disappear from Google. Heck, it might only take a few days, it’s hard to tell.

But, what do you do when your name shows up in PR or on other content where you don’t own or rent the space? PR on third party sites doesn’t go away and there isn’t much you can do about it. That’s the rub, as I can still find an article from 1994 that I wrote about my college fraternity. Luckily, I don’t have a concern with what I wrote at that time, but many folks do end up writing things that they wouldn’t be proud of fifteen years later.

Everyday I see examples of published content that is going to be duplicated on other sites and regretted by the author later. I still see candidates who are interviewing for jobs at my employer who write about the process and have no idea that hundreds of folks at our company have Google Alerts set up that notify us when something is published. If you write it, publish it on your blog and include a keyword that people monitor, you better be quite the “houdini” if you think you are going to make it disappear.