About 6 years ago, several members of a seo-type forum mentioned my name in sentences that also included some pretty embarrassing words. The words really had nothing to do with me. My name just happened to in close proximity to their trash talk. I wasn't even a member of the forum; they happened to pick it up through some searches.
Even though browsers could read the threads and determine that it was an unintended reference, I fear that most people will always hold the images of those words in connection with my name. Now that I'm a professional, I can't afford that situation to exist. I was hoping that some of you experts could give me a few tips.
The forum in question is a very old and huge one, having over 300,000 links for that particular page, and has an Alexa rank of 275,686 or 124,000 for the US. For some reason, Google currently lists it with a Pr of zero. It appears to be unmoderated, as no mods are listed, neither does the owner of the site answer his emails. Even though there are a mostly legitimate posts about web stuff, the forum is littered with spam from people listing credit card numbers, names, addresses, and pins. They call them cc dumps, so I assume they are ill-gotten. There are also adsense ads with this forum.
With my own amateur efforts, I had managed to displace the result from first page to forth page of my name Google search. That took considerable effort as it was a very stubborn link and tended to beat out a lot of very strong results.
Here are my questions: Why is that thread so difficult to beat? It's old and unattended; shouldn't it just fall away?
What would happen if I was to become a member of the site and begin posting threads. Would my new content make the old one go away, or would it only make things worse?
Could I report the forum to somebody, concerning those questionable credit card solicitations? Or, would that have the potential to backfire if the owner decided to make reprisals?
I really need your help, because I may have to become a SEO expert to beat this thing and I don't trust the RM companies out there. Thanks for you help!
