ASEOHosting Addresses International SEO Hosting Client’s “Right To Be Forgotten” Concerns
Hudson, FL (PRWEB) July 22, 2014 -- SEOHosting, a provider of premium international SEO hosting is releasing an advisory to address the concerns of international SEO hosting clients in light of the EU Court of Justice’s recent ruling that search engines must delist pages that contain references to individuals if those individuals make a request.
There are a number of misconceptions surrounding the “right to be forgotten” ruling (Case C-131/12 Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD), Mario Costeja González [2014] ECJ). As an expert provider of international hosting, ASEOHosting is well-placed to discuss what the ruling means for hosting clients who rely on EU search engine traffic.
The most important misconception to address is the sites to which the ruling applies. It does not apply to publishers, bloggers, social media networks, or other content sites — such sites have no obligation to remove content. It applies only to search engines at the moment and only when the linked content is deemed “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive”. In the months since the ruling, Google has rejected the majority of requests for data removal, because they don’t conform to those criteria.
Google may decide to remove links to personal data if requested by an EU citizen, regardless of where that site is hosted, but the removal will only impact local results: on http://www.google.fr, for example. It appears that Google is only removing results for queries specific to the individual requesting removal — for most queries the pages will appear as usual.
“The ‘right to be forgotten’ has the potential to impact search results for international SEO clients, but we believe the scope of the ruling is quite narrow — at the moment most site owners don’t need to be overly concerned,” commented ASEOHosting’s Vice President of Customer Relations, Daniel Page, “We decided to address the concerns of webmasters and help them understand exactly what impact the ruling is likely to have on their EU SERP presence.”
In the ruling from the European Court of Justice, three main decisions were made. The first concerns the territoriality of the ruling: many have asked why the ruling of the ECJ applies to a US company. The court decided that it has jurisdiction over companies processing data if they or a subsidiary sell advertising within a member state.
Secondly, the rule applies to search engines like Google because they are considered “controllers of personal data” by the court. The fact that they merely link to data was considered an adequate defense.
Thirdly, individuals have the right to ask that search engines to remove personal information and links to personal information in a narrow set of circumstances, to be decided on a case-by-case basis by Google and other search engines.
In summary, if Google receives a request to remove links to “personal data” from its results, it may remove them for a narrow set of queries that relate directly to the requester — the page in unlikely to be completely removed from the index and will still be searchable with queries unrelated to the individual who made the removal request.
###
About ASEOHosting:
ASEOHosting is the leader in providing all types of SEO Hosting, including Shared SEO Hosting, Dedicated SEO Hosting, US Dedicated SEO Servers, and EU Dedicated SEO Servers, based in Orlando, FL, and Detroit, MI, owned and operated by Ahosting, Inc., supplying hosting services that are truly beyond imagination. Since 2002, ASEOHosting has established one of the web’s premier solutions for reseller web hosting, multiple IP hosting, dedicated servers, and VPS hosting. For more information, visit http://www.aseohosting.com.
Daniel Page, ASEOHosting, http://www.aseohosting.com, +1 1 (407) 756-1133, [email protected]
Share this article