Your cemetery is on a website you do not control

Search your cemetery's name. Somewhere in the first few results — often above your own website, sometimes instead of it — is a page you did not make, carrying your name, a list of people buried in your grounds, and advertising you do not get paid for.

Operators find this infuriating, and then usually conclude there is nothing to be done. That is half right. You cannot make those pages disappear. You can stop them being the best answer available.

Why those sites exist and why the data is often wrong

Large genealogy and memorial directories are built mostly from volunteer contributions. Someone walks a cemetery, photographs markers, types what they can read, and uploads it. Other people add obituary details, family connections, and dates from their own research.

This is genuinely valuable work, and it is also exactly why the data drifts:

• A marker is not a record. Stones are carved by families, sometimes years later, sometimes from memory. Your ledger is closer to the source than the granite is.
• Unreadable stones get guessed. Weathered marble gets transcribed optimistically, and the guess becomes the record.
• Nobody is checking against you. The contributor has no access to your interment ledger. They cannot verify, so they do not.
• Corrections go to a stranger. A family who spots an error submits it to a moderation queue at a company with no relationship to your cemetery.
• Nothing expires. An error entered in 2011 is still there, and it has been copied by other sites since.

The practical consequence is that families arrive at your gate with printouts that disagree with your ledger, and your staff spend time on it.

What you can actually do

1. Correct what you can, but do not build a strategy on it

Most directories accept corrections, and some have a process for cemetery staff specifically. It is worth doing for high-traffic errors. It is not worth doing at scale, because you are volunteering unpaid labour to improve somebody else's product, and there is no end to it.

2. Make sure you exist in search at all

A surprising number of cemeteries have no web presence a search engine can use — no page with the name, address, phone number and hours in machine-readable form. When there is nothing authoritative to rank, directories rank by default. This is the cheapest fix available and most cemeteries have not done it.

3. Answer the question families are actually asking

Nobody searches your cemetery's name for fun. They search it because they want to know where someone is buried, when you are open, or how to reach a person. Directories rank because they appear to answer the first of those questions and you do not.

The moment a family can search your name and get an answer from your records, the directory becomes the second-best result. Search engines are quite good at working out which page is the authority on a subject when the authority actually shows up.

4. Be the place corrections go

This is the part that compounds. If a family can tell you that a date is wrong, and someone in your office approves or rejects it, then every correction improves your record instead of a stranger's. Over a few years the gap between your data and the directory's widens in your favour, and it becomes self-evident which one is right.

What not to do

• Do not send legal threats over the listing itself. Interment records are generally public information and the name of a cemetery is a fact. This rarely goes anywhere and can go somewhere embarrassing.
• Do not upload your full record set to a third-party site in the hope of fixing it. You are handing over the one asset that makes your page worth visiting, and you will not get it back.
• Do not assume nobody notices. Families do notice, and an inaccurate public record about someone's mother reflects on the cemetery, fairly or not.

The underlying point

You are not competing with those directories on volume, and you should not try. You are competing on a claim only you can make: these are the records of the people actually buried here, kept by the people who buried them.

That claim only helps you if there is somewhere for a family to go and see it. Until then, the directory is the only answer in town, and it will keep being the answer regardless of whether it is right.

Sources

Where the claims above come from. Anything based on our own work rather than a published source is labelled as such.

1. Our own audit of roughly 23,800 interment records at Mountain View Cemetery, Mesa, Arizona (2026), which is the basis for the claims about record accuracy.
2. No third-party directory is named in this piece. The description of how volunteer-contributed memorial data is gathered reflects those sites' own publicly documented contribution model.