I have a common name and someone else’s scandal is hurting my search results. What can be done?

Common-name confusion is a recognizable category of problem and the fix is technical. The work is entity disambiguation (making clear to the engines that two distinct people exist): making clear to the engines that two distinct individuals exist and that they are not the same person. The components are distinct schema markup (structured tags that tell search engines what a page is about) on each person’s owned properties (Person schema with unique identifiers), structured data (machine-readable facts tagged on a page) establishing the differences, sameAs links (identifiers that tell the engines which profiles belong to which person) pointing each entity to its proper reference set (LinkedIn, professional bios, Wikidata, where applicable Wikipedia), and updates to Wikidata so the disambiguation flows through to the Knowledge Graph (Google’s internal map of entities and how they relate). Where Wikipedia is involved, edit requests on the affected articles to clarify the distinction. Done correctly the engines learn to separate the two identities and the unrelated person’s scandal stops attaching to the client’s name. The work usually produces results within months and is one of the most leverage-rich interventions we run.