Reputation When your company failed and the internet kept the receipts

A company that closes leaves more online than one that succeeds without coverage. The launch coverage, the funding announcement, the shutdown post and whatever anybody wrote afterward all stay up, and they attach to the founder, not the dissolved entity, so years later, a search for your name turns up a story about something that ended. Some of it can be dealt with. Most can't. The part that works best is the part most people avoid.

Coverage of a real event does not come down

A news story about your company closing is accurate. Accuracy ends the removal conversation. What can move is the surrounding material: dead corporate pages, abandoned profiles, aggregator entries, and anything factually wrong about what happened.

The founder outlives the company

Search engines connect a person to a company for far longer than anybody involved expects. The entity is dissolved and the domain has lapsed, yet the association keeps ranking anyway, because nothing newer has arrived to take its spot.

Clear the debris first

A closed company leaves a lot of loose ends, and plenty of them are removable. Think abandoned profiles on directories, stale listings carrying an address that's now your home, and aggregator pages assembled automatically from filings, none of which is journalism, and most of which has a request process. Worth doing.

Take the address problem seriously. A dissolved business often leaves a founder's home address published across people-search sites, which is covered in our personal information guide, and our personal information removal is $399 with a thirty-day money-back guarantee and no conditions.

Deal with anything financial or legal on its own track

If the closure involved a bankruptcy or litigation, that's a separate job with a separate process. A petition puts your street address online alongside the filing, and the case lands on several legal aggregators at once, each with its own request route. Our bankruptcy records guide and court records guide cover both.

Six page-one bankruptcy results went to zero in three months in our bankruptcy work. Four aggregators were removed outright. The rest were outranked.

Owning the account beats burying it

The strongest page about a failure is usually the one written by the person it happened to. It ranks because it's the most relevant thing on the subject. It also settles the question, so a reader doesn't have to piece together an answer from coverage written by strangers.

Our founder did exactly this. It's why this company exists. The failure sits on the about page, stated plainly, instead of something the site works around. Bury an event that really happened and you tend to get a first page that reads like something is being hidden.

Then build what comes next

The old company still ranks because nothing newer is competing. A website on a domain you own, the profile set that fills the gaps, and current material about what you're doing now is what pushes a years-old shutdown post down the page.

The whole first two pages as one job is $2,488, one time. If there's a new story to tell, press placements are $499 to $5,999. You don't pay if we can't place it.

Make the next thing the first thing.

We clear what can be cleared, then build the pages that put what you're doing now above what ended.

Have us do it.

See the scope, price, and next steps for the help this guide describes.

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Your professional reputation is bigger than one page.

Your website, profiles, published work, and search results all shape what people learn about you. We help you promote existing work, address individual results, and keep track of what changes.

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Written by Drew Chapin, who ran all of this on his own name first.