Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 16th August 2011
*Forum that helped shut down industry agent punished
I received a phone call recently from a relatively well known industry agent telling me he was being forced to liquidate his company and begin again due to libellous comments made about him on the internet.
After spending nearly $50,000 on legal fees in the UK, US and Panama, my contact decided it would be more cost effective to close the business, rebrand and transfer all the assets into a new company. He even had to remove his name as a company director.
The problem he faced is that when you Googled either his name or that of his company, a page from a forum called the Rip Off Report appeared third in the search results. The page contained a string of comments from a Dutch man my contact claimed had set up and failed with a similar project.
He tried addressing the issues, asking the owner of the Rip Off Report to remove the posts, offered cash to the writer and finally undertook a string of ultimately unsuccessful law suits. One reason the law suits were unsuccessful is that the Rip Off Report moved country to avoid legal sanction.
Vampire business model
A large part of the business model of the forums such as these is to pick up traffic from people Googling brand names – in other words names that other businesses have spent thousands, often millions promoting.
The terms are easy to rank for and the resulting traffic is monetised through advertising. Whether the posts are true or not and how much damage is done to the recipient is immaterial to the profitability of the business model.
In the case of the The Rip Off Report, it has been accused in the US courts of creating fictional and libellious posts and more seriously, of trying to extort money from the victims. However, the company claims the accusations are unfounded and has never lost a legal case.
Many search engine experts believe the site has
violated Google’s terms of conduct and have called for Google to take action.
Google ban?
Well the good news is that Google took action this month and
removed all pages from the Rip Off Report from its index. Unfortuantely, this appears to only be temporary measure as the site appeared to have been re-instated when I checked this morning.
Policing the internet
The overseas property industry is not famous for high moral standards. There are numerous cases where criticisms of companies are based of real problems and sometimes even criminal behaviour
However, it is not difficult to
fall victim to libellious slurs from competitors and those with vested commercial interests.
The problem is that perpetrators can avoid legal action by basing themselves offshore. That leaves the only real effective global policeman as Google.
One solution would be for the US legal system to force Google to ban sites that have had complaints upheld against them in the US courts. It would create a huge industry of libel tourism in the US and a pay day for the lawyers. Google could be compensated for the added costs by a tax on the US legal profession.
Practical suggestions welcome
If you have faced or are facing similar issues, it would be very interesting to know any practical suggestions you have for dealing with them. All correspondence will be treated in the strictist confidence. Please email ashley.rigg@globaledge.co.uk or call +44 207 199 7891.
Source: Global edge
User Comments
Obviously can't go into detail but I have a client who Googles horrifically at the moment, again through zero fault of their own, and it is proving to be tricky to rectify. This particular client has lost business to an eyewatering value as a result of the erroneous poor online portrayal...
Sarah Drane,
Purple Cake Factory SL
One of the projects I work on http://www.onlinevisibilityexperts.com/
deals with issues like this within the guideline of reputation management and repair services. The problem is, the litigation element is not cheap as the above agent found out to their cost. Perhaps the simplest way to deal with issues like this is to force the erroneous comment well off the front page of any search engines using the services of professional SEO's.
Andy Stevenson,
Realpress.net