Is the customer always right? When the Ripoff Report is involved, that seems to be the case – even when the Ripoff Report user who is writing about your business is leaving you a false and defamatory review.

Ripoff Report refuses to remove  any posting from their website, no matter how untruthful, inaccurate, defamatory, or damaging to you that posting may be. Even if the author of the defamatory post admits to the wrongdoing and would be willing to delete their defamatory postings, the Ripoff Report will not remove the Ripoff Report review.

Can I Remove Ripoff Report Reviews by Pushing Them Down in the Rankings?

Not easily. Ripoff Report ranks very high in the search engines. This means, for any negative or defamatory post that shows up among the first search results for your business on Google, it is extremely difficult to push that page lower in the search results.

Placing positive reviews or other information about your business above highly-ranked Ripoff Report content would require your company to be posted about on major websites and online publications, such as Huffington Post, Fox News, or The New York Times.

I have seen a number of different techniques used in similar situations, including: paying an online reputation management firm to help push down the report; enrolling in Ripoff Report’s “VIP Arbitration Program,” (which can lead to removing portions of a post – but not complete removal of the negative ripoff report post); posting a rebuttal yourself at the Ripoff Report ( if done correctly, your Ripoff Report rebuttal appears below the original report); and to suing Ripoff Report itself – to date, companies have not been successful suing them, and I don’t anticipate that will change. Each of these strategies has significant drawbacks.

However, there is another approach to dealing with defamatory negative posts, which I have found to be very effective: obtaining a court order that states the online report contains false or defamatory information, and ultimately having Google and other search engines delist the page from its search engine indices.

So – How Can You Remove Ripoff Report Reviews?

To get a Ripoff Report post removed from a search engine, the first step is filing a legitimate lawsuit against the report’s original author. Here’s how it works: we obtain court orders via default judgments, court judgments, and through agreements with the defendants. Once a judgment or settlement has been reached, and a court order has been obtained, the court order must be presented to the search engine.

Based on their policy, Google, for example, will typically honor this court order – although Google is not legally required to do so. By honoring the court order and removing the content from its search index, your potential clients will not be able to locate the defamatory content by searching for it on Google. The defamatory content may still be alive on the Ripoff Report, but your potential client won’t be able to find the report in a company search, and the threat of further damage to your reputation and your business will be dramatically reduced.

While having search engines remove defamatory material from search indices is the best solution, it is crucial that a complaint is filed before the statute of limitations expires. The statutes of limitations are one year in most states, but it varies by jurisdiction. Thus, it is critical to consult with an attorney as soon as possible.

If your business is the victim of a negative or defamatory Ripoff Report,  make sure authors of defamatory statements don’t get away with harming your reputation.