Is a mugshot of your DUI arrest (but no conviction) 20 years ago the only remotely notable thing you've ever done in your life? If so, why shouldn't it be the first result of a search for your name? 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.
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).
Any system that functions as a gatekeeper to full participation in society needs accountability.