The information that emerges from queries to your name on search engines is not to your liking? You have the power to make them disappear. Here’s how.

Step 1: Alert the site manager

It is not the search engine that is responsible for the information it references but the webmaster of the original site. You must therefore contact him, justifying your desire to see the content concerning you:

– modified: the article is modified;

– or removed: the article remains unchanged but is no longer found by search engines, and therefore no longer appears in search results.

Next:

– The website then has 1 month to answer you.

– If there is no answer within 1 month, you can appeal to the National Commission for Information Technology and Freedom. All you have to do is fill in a form.

– You can also contact them  if you were not satisfied with the webmaster’s answer.

Good to know: the content in question must harm your e-reputation or your security (compromising film, bank data, letter of insults, etc.).

Step 2: remove the content from the cache

Even if the disputed content has been removed from the site, its trace will continue to appear in search engines for a few days to a few weeks: this is the cache.

Indeed, the indexing robots that update search engines sometimes only crawl the sites every 3 weeks! This is how you sometimes come across classified ads that have expired.

If this happens with content that should have been deleted, search engines provide a procedure to make the cache disappear.

For Google, for example, all you have to do is go to this address and click on “here” from the following phrase from the last paragraph that has a yellow background. The phrase must read something like: “We may also publish similar information from your notice to our Transparency Report. You may find out more information about the Report here”.

Note: You need to have a Gmail account. The procedure is accessible to the webmaster of the site but also to Internet users.

Hope the above helps you out if you have an issue with your privacy settings on Google. You might also like to read 6 Tips to Secure Your Smart Phone.

Remember to leave your comments in the sections below if you would like to read on a particular topic.