Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Can one appeal to Google?
If the Anti-Site refers to a restaurant and complains about overcooked steaks then retrain the chefs and invite the complainant to come and sample the new food. Offer a 25% discount to all past steak-customers for a month as apology and remarketing tool.
If the Anti-Site refers to misleading business practices, issue an unreserved apology, compensate where appropriate, resolve the misleading business practices, and inform the site owner. Invite the site owner to come and verify that the practices have been resolved.
If the Anti-Site refers to personal views of yours which are controversial then there's nothing you can do about it and it's quite proper. If this is the case then you should be ashamed to even think about removing people's freedom to disagree with you.
Finally, all these assume that there is some merit in the Anti-site. If the Anti-site is full of lies then explain and prove that they are lies. Let the webmaster evaluate your proof. If they still persist, even when provided detailed and reliable evidence, then it would be reasonable to take legal proceedings. Note that unless you have disproven the statements to the webmaster beyond reasonable doubt then you should not proceed to legal moves as it will just escalate the situation.
Be aware that even if you do appease the webmaster he is still quite within his rights to leave the content online with an 'update' attached. So long as he's not breaking the law you can't make him remove the content which upset you.
Kaled.
If they are in organic results, you could probably create some sub-domains that may bump the listing down in the results, see if you can get other sites to throw up positive content about the company.
McDonalds failed miserably when trying to use a pack of lawyers to bring down some protesters:
[google.com...]
If these people do have a legit gripe, the site will probably not come down and any emails, legal threats and anything else other than a genuine attempt to rectify the situation may make its way onto the web and compound the problem. Bloggers pick it up, the news mdeia may pick it up, it grows, it gets out of control, best to just fix the problem and turn the person into an advocate.
What would happen to Google's credibility as a search engine if they obeyed all of the "They don't like us!" complaints and removed from their index any sites that were critical?
