Reverse SEO - intentionally get a lower ranking

[shorebreak]

I remember seeing an article not too long ago on how to get a particular page ranked *lower* on Google, anyone have a link to it?

I have a friend who runs a big investment fund, and when you search for his name his associations with a particular religion come up as #1. What I want to do is help him so that that result doesn't show up, or shows up *lower* in the SERPs.

Any advice is much appreciated, as usual.

Shorebreak

[jtara]

I assume that these references are on pages that he has no control over. I can't imagine you can do much.

He needs a good PR program that will associate his name with the investment fund. You need to spread the name around, associated with the fund, so that there are more references to this than to his religious association.

If he's been outspoken or active in his religion, and now doesn't want that publicized - well, he has to make a choice, and be less active.

There ARE a few places where you have some control, though. You can request that references be removed from the Wayback Machine at archive.org. (But only for websites that he may have controlled.) You can request that Usenet posts that he may have authored be removed from various Usenet archives (Google Groups, etc.)

I'm afraid much more than this is going to go into black-hat territory, as your fundamental problem is lowering rankings of web sites that aren't your clients.