DNS questions comming up on search engines

Probably this will help others as well.

One of my friends, is a regular visitor to this site, and he got help from you guys, for his company. But, now this is backfiring on him.

When anyone searches his company name, all his threads comes up!

And his company doesn't like it. He removed and edited his threads to get away from the search engines, but unfortunately, he doesn't have the rights to ammend or remove the threads that answered his questions. This comes up too.

How can he remove the original thread. He was hesitant to ask for help by revealing his company name, but some of your guys didn't like it, and so he had to give the name of his company. It seems he was right.

Does anyone know what email address he has to use to contact the webmaster, or does anyone else have any other ideas?

Max

If it is only a few threads, you can PM the individual users that posted.
If it is really many, there is few you can do about it. Besides this, google caches old pages so some of them might never be removed (I don't know their caching policy).

You can see the list of admins for this site by clicking on "Forum leaders" on the index page. But I somewhat doubt they will be pleased to do what you are requesting... Sounds quite time consuming...

The company has such a bad ranking that the few Dev Shed posts outrank them? Well, improve their ranking so they will be listed on top! Or did your friend make 100s or 1000s of posts containing the company name?

(mods, can we have this thread moved to the lounge please?)

M.

First some information then some bad news

popular forums that do not exclude their boards with the robots.txt file end up extremely popular on search engines. Search engines like google rank you higher if your site is clicked on a lot in search results. Therefor new sites may find it a tough time beating an established mega-content board. For example. My DNS Crawler script is extremely popular. I look at my website logs and see all sorts of people making searches and linking to it from google. However when I make a search:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...8&q=dns+crawler

DevShed is the first ranked.
ServerExpert (another board) is ranked second
Finally comes me, ranked 3rd.

If he can't raise his popularity above boards such as these, then I can't blame him. However, I don't mind cause even if they get to me through another website, I still get the traffic. I'm still advertised, and therefor don't care how people get to my site as long as they get there.

Now for the bad news:

Even if you remove all topics containing your company name, search engines like google will not remove you from their results. Not only will you have to remove all topics with your company name, you'll have to contact google (and other search engines) themselves to see if they'll be willing to remove certain entries from their database.

Thanks for your comments,

now I understand what's going on, but my friend had only asked a few questions, so i think we can just sort it out with dev shed, but if the threads keep coming up, then maybe we can resort to contacting the search engines.

I will keep you informed.

Thanks anyway

Max

This issue comes up a lot on the qmail list (one of the most unpleasant online dwelling places...)

Essentially: to solve technical issues, we often need your domain name and/or DNS information. This is the nature of free, public help.

If your company doesn't like this, then it can hire a consultant, so that their details don't appear on any support forums, which are regularly indexed by search engines.