Robert_Charlton - 11:33 pm on Oct 4, 2009 (gmt 0)

...just to make sure it wasnt a cache thing.

Just so there's no ambiguity, cache and cookies are different, and browsing histories would be stored by Google and identified either via cookies or by account sign in. Since you're not signed in and cookies in different browsers are stored in different places, and you tried four of them, it's not likely that this is personalized data you're seeing.

But this is a reputation management kind of issue, analogous to but not exactly the same as having an unfriendly site in the top ten (or twenty) that ranks for [MyDomain.com sucks]. In serp-related reputation management, you need to drive the offending phrase down by creating pages with other phrases that will be commonly associated with "MyDomain.com".

With Google Suggest, you're not necessarily dealing with phrases that rank in the top 10 for MyDomain.com. You're dealing with commonly occurring phrases of which MyDomain.com is one word. Though right now, "MyDomain.com" and "MyDomain.com sucks" are the only 2 suggestions appearing in Suggest, the Suggest list will expand to as many as 10, so you're going to have create at least 9 other combinations associated with your domain name and tld that outweigh any offending phrases. This is not easy.

While we can't discuss specific domain names or search terms here, we can mention, say "microsoft.com". Type it in the Google search box and watch how the suggestions change as you type each letter... and note what happens when you get to the dot in .com, and then the "c". Finally, you'll end up with a set of products associated with "Microsoft.com" and subdirectories on the Microsoft site, which are also of course associated with Microsoft.com. You're going to have to find a way to do something similar for your domain.

Also, look at Google's suggestions for various competing domains, and note what pops up as you type their names. You'll see that there's a fairly common set of negatives that appear for domain names in any competitive market area.

Current law protects the various "review" sites that put this material up. They represent the spectrum from free speech to extortion rackets of sorts. Many of them survive by selling ads.

Note that you'll need to use Google search find out how many such pages for each phrase combination you're dealing with to get "mydomain.com sucks" and other negatives that might occur off the list.

I'll look into the Labs project more and see if that helps.

Again, Google Suggest was a Lab project. Now it's a standard feature.