Ever see the movie Nothing?  It’s not too great, but features the usually-entertaining David Hewlett as a man who (along with one friend) has the ability to “hate things away,” meaning make stuff he dislikes disappear.  Unfortunately, rather few of us can have the same effect on Web pages, and Google’s Matt Cutts recently explained why.

Responding to a theoretical questioner, Cutts wrote, “The page you pointed out is not spam, and pretty much the only removals (at least in the U.S., which is what I know about) that we do for legal reasons are if a court orders us.  We typically say that if person A doesn’t like a webpage B, only removing page B out of Google’s search results doesn’t do any good because webpage B is still there (e.g. it can be found by going to it directly or through other search engines).”

Which is a reasonable enough stance.  If something important is at stake, though - suppose someone’s lied about you or your company, or otherwise created a PR disaster - Cutts went on to outline the couple of remaining (and somewhat obvious) options.

“Either contact whoever put up webpage B and convince them to modify or to take the page down. Or if the page is doing something against the law, get a court to agree with you and force webpage B to be removed or changed. We really don’t want to be taking sides in a he-said/she-said dispute, so that’s why we typically say ‘Get the page fixed, changed, or removed on the web and then Google will update our index with those changes the next time that we crawl that page.’”

One last tip: for a much better David Hewlett movie, try A Dog’s Breakfast or Get Down.

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