Making a name disappear from Google

An interesting challenge: a person has contacted me requesting that I help him to 'remove' some listings that show up for his name in Google (they are from a past part of his career that he doesn't want new employers to know about). Some of these links are to major sites, like amazon. This is a whole new arena to me. As I see it, there are a few possible approaches:

1. writing to sites and asking them to alter/remove his name (the most straightforward approach)

2. pushing the links onto lower pages by creating pages with higher links.

3. writing to Google??? Do they consider such cases? (yeah, right...)

4. attempting to trigger spam filters for the pages in question.

I think I will attempt a combination of numbers 1 and 2. Does anybody have any other ideas on this?

H.

If he has no control over those pages it will be difficult and I think number 1 is your best bet. It is often stated about Google that nothing another webmaster does can negatively affect your site, so unless the webmasters of those pages actually make some changes themselves, the pages are not just going to disappear.

Gringo.

It's something to think about - a good Google rank can actually be your undoing! It can be like a rap sheet.

Write to each of those sites telling them you found some crazy file in their cgi-bin in the Google directory, say it might be a security problem, tell them that modifiying the robots.txt files would be the best way to stop spiders crawling their sensitive information.

Keep your eye on their robots.txt file, when they change it in some way, go to http://services.google.com:8882/urlconsole/controller , get an account and pretend you own their url and continue as though you wanted to remove your URL.

Apparently sites are temporarily removed from Google completely by doing this?!?!?

kinda sneaky... lol loving it though

Not sure if it works - but I hear that it does if it's done correctly!

Feel free to try it out and let me know - I'm too honest to try those kinda things

Yeah, I'm not much for sabotaging other's work. That would be a virtuoso performance, though.

Maybe I'll suggest that he change his name.

That's probably a better idea - He can dodge tax that way too