The EU's decision requiring search engines to remove certain links from search results has spawned an emerging market.
Since the European Union’s top court ruled in May that individuals have the “right to be forgotten,” Google has been working to comply with the new rules. The company has received more than 70,000 requests from people who want 250,000 websites removed from Google’s search results. Google’s team reviews each request individually, and the company plans to hire more employees to handle the additional workload. Changing the way people think about the Internet is a huge task.
But Google isn't the only company scrambling in the wake of the European Union's ruling. As internet users start to demand the removal of unwanted moments from their past or personal contact information from Google's search results, so-called reputation management companies have a lot of work to do.
While they have traditionally been limited to creating new online content for their clients—complimentary blog posts, celebratory articles, social media updates—these companies are now trying to help their clients delete content. “Managing one’s online image has always been about producing new content so that they have a better online image,” says Sice Myers, a professor at Virginia Tech and a research legal editor at the Institute for Public Affairs. “Here they are doing the opposite.”
Online reputation management is a growing industry, which will now be boosted by the EU ruling. For a fee that can run into thousands of dollars a month, companies take on clients and clean up their search results by creating optimized content that dusts off the first pages of Google search results. Clients range from CEOs, major corporations, celebrities to doctors and restaurateurs who use the services to clean up their online presence. Consulting firm BIA/Kelsey predicts that small and medium-sized businesses will spend $3.5 billion on reputation management in 2014.
Now, the EU court’s ruling has changed the dynamics of the industry, broadening the customer base of these businesses and making it easier for them to delete content rather than simply create new content. “Our inbound traffic” – new referrals – “has gone up about 50% since the beginning of May,” says Simon Wandsworth, chief executive of UK-based reputation management firm Igniyte. The EU ruling “has raised awareness for the industry. We can change the way we do things online.”
Google has taken a hard line against many of the requests made by reputation management companies, with the overwhelming majority of requests for content removal being denied. Andy Donaldson, CEO of reputation management company Hit Search, said he has sent hundreds of requests for his clients to Google. Of the requests Google has responded to, fewer than ten percent have been granted, he says. That’s because Google won’t remove a search result like a newspaper article about a public figure, for example, or a negative review of a construction company.
“People think we have some magic button on Google and we press it to delete,” says Wandsworth, the CEO of Igniyte. His clients often request the removal of links that Google won’t accept. “We tell the majority of these people that they have no chance,” says Wandsworth.
Regardless of their success, the decision on the right to be forgotten is set to lead to business growth for some time to come.
Source: fortunegreece.com
