by Structured Settlement Watchdog
The Practical Law Institute published an interesting article about Google De-indexing Abuse, by Matthew E. Kelley. of the Washington DC law firm, Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz, LLP (which merged with Ballard Spahr in October 2017) Kelley touches on the Google Deindexing scam orchestrated by Richart Ruddie (and in one case tied to AnnuitySold, a structured settlement factoring company connected to Ruddie), in this excerpt:
“But the sketchier consultants and attorneys offering to whitewash their clients’ online image promote the possibility of erasing negative content without noting how difficult that is to do lawfully, and some, as discussed below, engage in decidedly “black hat” practices.
Profile Defenders, which has boasted that it “can remove almost any unwanted webpage from the internet,” also has ties to a Florida lawyer whose website states that he “may be able to help you ‘hide’” negative online information “with a new and effective service.” Zachary Sloan has filed several lawsuits in which the plaintiffs claim to have reached settlement agreements with previously anonymous authors of negative online postings. The plaintiff in one of them is another Profile Defenders entity, SEO Profile Defender Network LLC, which filed a defamation claim targeting a 2011 Ripoff Report posting that called Profile Defenders a “scam company.” The complaint claimed that Profile Defenders had conducted “a due diligence search of all their competitors” that traced the comment to “Narender Koshik” of Sri Ganganagar, an Indian city near the border with Pakistan. The parties filed and the court approved a stipulated judgment that required “Koshik” to seek removal of the posting and allowed Profile Defenders to “submit this Order to Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other Internet search engine so that the link can be removed from their search results pursuant to their existing policies concerning de-indexing of defamatory material.
Google’s mechanism for deindexing content includes an automated tool for users to submit copies of the relevant court orders.38 Google will review and consider deindexing specific pages declared unlawful, though it does not commit to deindex every URL purportedly covered by every court order.39 Like many other websites and search engines, Google provides copies of takedown and deindexing requests to the Lumen project, which archives the requests in a searchable database. (All of the deindexing requests discussed in this article are archived in the Lumen database.) Google prominently tells its users that deindexing requests will be sent to Lumen, a policy that Google says is part of its commitment to transparency and the free flow of information”.