Somebody e-mailed me out of the blue today with a bizarre complaint and request.
This person, lets just call him George, was someone that my wife and I knew very briefly about 5 years ago. Lisa had written a column about rape for the college newspaper, and people from the campus feminist group were outraged and showed up outside the newspaper to protest.
So George was assigned by the student newspaper to write a story about that protest. This happened back in September 1997, and I made a web page with links to all sorts of articles, including Lisa’s column, and included a link to the story that George wrote about the controversy.
And I hadn’t thought about that particular episode in a long time until George wrote me out of the blue. You see, I put all of the rape-related stuff on a page just titled “Rape.” So now, if you do a Google search on George’s name, the second link that comes up is this “Rape” page. As George put it,
When my name is typed in to a search engine, the word “Rape” is very noticeable near the top. . . . I would appreciate it kindly if you could help [rectify that].
The really weird thing is that the link Google returns isn’t even a real page — it’s a redirect. In fact if you look at the Google cache, it is clearly a cached redirect (the link on the results page is different than the URL from which the cache content is taken from). Why Google returns the redirect but not the actual page as a result is really mystifying.
One thing I’ve noticed is that Google comes up with odd results when it only finds a handful of hits on a search term, and in this case a search on his name only returns 11 links.
Hopefully adding this redirect page to the robots.txt file will fix the problem.