BLACKSBURG -- A restaurateur believes his business is down 30 percent because people mistakenly associate his establishment with an alleged double murderer.

For that, Nino Ceritano blames The Roanoke Times.

As of Friday, typing "Ceritano's Restaurant" into Google brought up Times articles about the fatal shooting of a sheriff's deputy and a security guard as the top two listings. The restaurant was mentioned in coverage of the shootings because Michael Morva, brother of the accused killer William Morva, had been working at Ceritano's. Michael Morva was arrested and charged with conspiring to help a prisoner escape, and police have said he helped his brother escape. Ceritano's wife, Tina, told the Times that Michael Morva was a good worker.

Even though the articles do not appear when some other likely search terms for the restaurant are typed into Google, Ceritano says he believes people are being put off the restaurant by mistakenly associating it with the crime.

"What do you think when you put in a restaurant and a killer comes up?" he asked.

Ceritano said the restaurant, which opened in late 2004, was doing well before the shootings. In May he expanded the establishment's seating area to allow up to 80 patrons. But after the shootings, fewer people started coming, Ceritano said.

Wondering what was going on, he brought in a restaurant consultant in January.

"He was here five days to see what we were doing wrong," Ceritano said. "He said, 'Nothing.' "

More recently, Ceritano said, a patron mentioned the Google results.

Ceritano's worry over the article illustrates the increasing concern businesses large and small have with how they appear in Web search results.

Though search rankings are influenced by many factors outside of business, in Google's case the number of times links to a page appear on the Web, and the popularity of the sites containing those links, play a large role. An entire industry is now made up of companies promising to help businesses improve how they appear in search engines.

In 2006 advertisers spent $9.4 billion on search engine marketing, 62 percent more than the year before, according to a survey by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, which predicts spending will grow to $18.6 billion by 2011.

According to SEMPO, the most popular form of search engine marketing -- as measured by the number of companies doing it but not by dollars spent -- is that which tries to improve where Web sites appear in the nonpaid section of search sites. That is the section of Google that Ceritano was unhappy with. Ceritano said he had never considered hiring a search-engine specialist to address his problem.

SEMPO spokesman Greg Jarboe said large companies are far more likely to focus on search engines "but it's been one of the growing trends that small businesses are learning that this is having an impact on them, too."

When told of Ceritano's concern, Jeff Nelson, president of search marketing firm Anduro Technologies Inc., said it sounded like something that would be "really easy" for a company like his to address.

Businesses that object to Web pages sometimes hire search marketing companies to try to make those pages less prominent by getting pages they prefer to appear higher in search results.

Ceritano said he had not contacted Google with his concerns. Unless asked to remove pages by the webmaster responsible for them, Google's policy is to only block pages from its listings if they violate certain guidelines or contain hostile software such as viruses or trojans. At The Roanoke Times, it is company policy not to delete stories from the Web archive, which is the only sure way to prevent a Google hit on the stories.

On Feb. 23, Michael Morva was sentenced to serve eight years on charges related to burglary attempts that took place more than a year before the shootings.

In a hearing on Michael Morva's conspiracy charges on Friday, it was ruled he can undergo a psychiatric evaluation to judge whether he is competent to assist in his own defense.