: Google crawling privacy: how to protect customer names from being indexed I have a key marketing page with customer testimonials. I want to show my customer's names to make the testimonials more

@Nimeshi995

I think you're approaching this all wrong. Generally speaking if you don't seek permission prior to publishing their name online then they may not like that regardless if it does not appear in Google or Bing search results.

You want to seek permission from hereafter

When obtaining reviews and testimonials you should have a privacy notice informing the customer that you will publish this online. With that said many businesses forget to do so and therefore they run into issues like this.

Editing Testimonials

It is perfectly acceptable to 'edit' previous testimonials, so that they are less identifiable, this can be simply done by removing parts of their 'full name' or anything within the testimonial e.g


from: "my wife jane loves it, thanks James Brown"
to: "my wife loves it, thanks j.brown"
or: "my wife loves it, thanks j.b"


Most previous customers will not complain if you use this method, and if they do... you remove it from the site.

Now and on-going

The correct method opted by the biggest E-commerce websites in the world is to use one of three methods:


First Name & Surname Initial


e.g Simon.H

First Name Initial & Surname


S.Hayter

Nicknames (Amazon, eBay, eBuyer, Pro Webmasters etc)


This allows customers to choose how they want their name to appear on the site e.g:


SimonHayterUK
Jonathan
Goyllo

Vote Up Vote Down