When alumni have done Google searches for classmates, many times they (including myself) have come across searches that indicate a living individual is listed on our site as deceased, when in fact they are living.

I get queries from classmates who think someone has died due to how Google lists information from our website, I then check out our website and these individuals are actually not listed in the "In Memory" section.

Is there a reason for this?
Can it be fixed or not?

Here is an example of a recent Google search and how it shows a classmate listing after searching for Bunny Stringfellow. Actually none of the names below are listed in our "In Memory" section!
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In Memory - Contact Us
... Shirley Rise Stringer (1949), Bill Stringfellow (1961), Bunny Stringfellow (1963), Florence Stringfellow (1931), Mary Levinia Stringfellow (1929) ...
www.classcreator.com/.../class_inmemory_contact_form.cfm - Cached - Similar

Oh wow, how interesting. I can certainly see why this would cause some confusion.

I'll have to check with the programmer on this tomorrow, but my theory is that this is a self contained section that has all of the code on one page. We only display portions of that code based on what the user is clicking on though, such as the In Memory Contact Us form. While we're only showing a portion of the code and content, Google seems to be indexing the entire page anyway, thus pulling names of living Classmates. I suspect the only way to fix this is to in some fashion break apart the page so living Classmate names are never part of the hidden source code when the In Memory entries are displayed.

Another possible fix is to put code WITHIN the page itself telling Google to ignore only a certain portion of the page. Last time I checked this was only possbile with Yahoo and not Google, but things may have changed.

Thanks for bringing this up. Very interesting, and something we'll definitely try to fix.

Brad, I noticed this early on with my Web launch, and find it's a typical Google result, mixed information. If you can find a way to get this resolved - superb!

Wouldn't this be a non-issue if In Memory is password protected?

Yes. We'll see if we can fix this for people who leave it open too.

This is now fixed but it will take a couple weeks, possibly longer, until Google updates all of their listings.