Google removes certain personal content from its results on request, free, without a lawyer, and without the page owner's agreement. Most people do not know this, and some services charge for filling in the same form. Here is what qualifies, and how.
What Google removes on request
- Intimate or sexual images of you published without your consent, including fake ones made with your face.
- Your personal contact details: phone numbers, home address, email addresses, and identity, bank or card numbers.
- Images of anyone under 18.
- Content published to expose you, with threats attached.
- Content from sites that charge to take it down.
What it does not
- News reporting, court records and public registers.
- Opinions and reviews that are unpleasant but not unlawful.
- Anything that is simply unflattering. For that, the work is different: building what stands in front of it.
The steps
- Collect the exact addresses of the pages, and of the images themselves. Right-click an image and copy its address; Google needs both.
- Open Google's removal form and choose the matching category: sexual or intimate images, personal information, or a person under 18.
- For a phone number, an address or an email, sign in to Results about you, which finds the results and files the request for you, and keeps watching.
- Submit, and keep the case number from the confirmation email. Decisions arrive by email, usually within days, sometimes weeks.
- Remember what this does. Removal from Google makes the page unfindable through Google. The page itself still exists, and removing it there is a separate request to the host, which is the part I usually handle.
Outdated pages
If a page has changed or been deleted but the old version still shows in results, Google's refresh tool updates it within a day or two. This is the one most people miss.
In the European Union and the United Kingdom there is also a formal right to have results about you delisted when they are inaccurate, irrelevant or excessive. That right does not exist in the same form in the Gulf, so do not pay anyone who sells it to you here.
Send me the exact searches and the results that concern you. You get back a list sorted into what Google removes, what the host must remove, and what has to be outranked, before anything is priced.
