Reputation attacks on businesses
The grouping scheme

The Eight Groups

Overview

Everything on this site sits in one of eight groups. Four describe where an attack happened and what that kind of operator does about it. Four describe what can be done and what each response actually achieves.

The split matters because the two halves answer different questions and most people need both. Where it happened decides what is possible — a review platform, a social network, a publisher and a complaint site have almost nothing in common in how they handle a request, and a strategy that works on one is wasted on another. What can be done decides what it costs, how long it takes, and whether the outcome is the content coming down or simply being harder to find.

Reading across, not down

If you already know the platform, start on the left. If you know what you want to happen — it comes down, it stops ranking, it gets documented — start on the right. Most people arrive knowing the platform and needing the response, which is why the two halves are laid out to be read across rather than down.

Within the platform side, the four groups run roughly from the most tractable to the least. Review platforms publish detailed content rules and enforce them, which gives a request something specific to aim at. Social networks publish rules too, but almost none of them concern whether a statement is true. Publishers and complaint sites are the hardest category on the site and contain both pages that carry a no removal route verdict. Video sits apart because the content is heavy, the reach is fast, and the record of what was said is thin or nonexistent once a broadcast ends.

Within the response side, the four groups run in the order the work actually happens. Evidence first, because it disappears. Then removal, where it is available. Then suppression, for everything that will not come down. Harm runs alongside all three, because the measurements that matter have to start before the numbers move.

Every page names something that will not work

That is a rule the site enforces on itself rather than a promise about tone. Each entry carries a row marked what will not work, and the build fails if one is missing. It is there because every competitor in this market leads with what is possible, and a page that only lists possibilities is how a business ends up paying in advance for an outcome the platform has publicly said it does not permit.

Dates on everything

Where a platform's policy is quoted anywhere on this site, it is quoted in the operator's own words with the operator's own last updated date and the date I read it. Most of it was read on 12 August 2026. Platform policy changes without notice and often without a changelog entry — check the date on the quote, then check the operator's page, before acting on any of it.

Why eight groups and not four

An earlier version of this structure had four: the platforms, the removals, the evidence, and the money. It collapsed the moment it met a real matter. A Google review and a Ripoff Report page are both places a business gets attacked, and they have nothing whatever in common in what can be done about them — one has a published removal process with an appeal, the other has an operator whose stated policy is that it does not remove postings. Filing them under one heading would put the two most different pages on the site next to each other and imply they were the same problem.

The same is true on the response side. Getting content removed and getting a search result suppressed are routinely sold as the same service, and they are not remotely the same outcome. Separating them into their own groups is the structure doing the work the copy would otherwise have to do on every page.

If you are not sure where to start

Start with what can and cannot be removed. It is the cornerstone of the site and it is built entirely out of what six operators have said about their own platforms, in their own words, with dates. If you read one page here before spending money with anyone — including me — read that one.

Keep reading

Or read the two halves straight through

Where it happened decides what is possible at all. What can be done decides what it costs and how long it takes.

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