> If not, why is it the first result?

Because google search rankings for any niche search strings are pretty meh. Basically anything with your full name in the URL / main body of the page will show up at the top.

I filled the first two pages of results for my name with random stuff I control simply by creating profiles on carefully-chosen sites with my full name, as well as registering a bunch of domains that contain my full name.

That was much easier than contacting the hundreds of news outlets who published my full name in a negative context to correct their lackluster or ambiguous journalism.

There was a few notable exceptions where journalists (who all like to copy stories from each other, then copy that again) had distorted the story so far that they actually managed to confuse me with the perpetrator. In those cases I had the search results removed under the "right to be forgotten".

Honestly I'd rather have the right to be forgotten in a world where bad journalism is the norm, and where trash like the Daily Mail, yellow press, and some kid with a smear campaign have so much power to destroy a persons reputation.

Basically you shouldn't have to know what "SEO" means in order to fend off a smear campaign or simply bad journalism.

I think you deserve better than just having google modify its search results. If a newspaper is slandering you, we need to make them stop.

It's virtually impossible to win a libel case against a news media organization in the US.

If you're a "public figure" (and if more than one media org ran a story about some event involving you, the court will likely find that you are), then to win you need to prove not only that 1) the story was false, but also that 2) the journalist knew the story was false, prior to writing it, and 3) you suffered some material loss due to the story (e.g. being fired from your job).

In other words, journalists can publish speculation as fact (what we might call "lying"), so long as you can't prove they knew for certain it was false.

(In the very unlikely event you aren't found to be a public figure, you still need to prove the story was false and that you suffered a material loss, themselves pretty steep legal hurdles).

I’m really talking about the mechanism of enforcement. Your point about the legal aspects are well taken. But, once those aspects have been resolved, as in Europe, I think there needs to be a better resolution than breaking search. Think about it, looking to Google as the solution assumes they have a monopoly on search.

You don't have to know what "SEO" means in order to fend off a smear campaign or simply bad journalism. You may not have to know what SEO means in order to get your defense sorted higher in search engine results than the slander, but you have to do it because you set SEO as your goal yourself.

I feel for you, out of curiosity did you create your profiles and sites purely to displace the bad results or did you also try to engineer your content to refute them?

Yes. My personal blog (which is now the first result) contains a statement as well as a link to a properly researched article (the source that broke the news), so the article would presumably rank higher in the search results for my name.

Who decides what is notable? You? Google? Some jerk who has it in for me?

Any system that functions as a gatekeeper to full participation in society needs accountability.

In this situation, google, since that's the search engine under discussion. Feel free to hold them accountable if you like. China did.