Ripoff Report - A Brief History

Ed Magedson created ripoffreport.com in early 1998 as a consumer advocacy portal, and the site has been heavily trafficked, as well as highly indexed by Google ever since.

Ripoff Report differs from most review and rating sites such that it concentrates solely on negative experiences, complaints, and reviews. Users of the site are able to anonymously post negative reviews with any vetting or confirmation as to the validity of the accusations. Further, once posted to the site, not even the original author can edit or remove the ripoff report. This is one of the reasons it is so damaging to online reputations, as well as of importance to deal with any report as swiftly as possible.

Websites such as Ripoff Report are protected from having to remove negative reviews mainly as a result of the Communications Decency Act (Section 230), which states, in summary, that in instances where the content is posted by a user of the site, and not the ownership, they are not responsible for such content. This mean ripoffreport.com and others can take advantage of the views and clicks they gain from inflammatory and false reviews, without any consequences.

One piece of advice we always stress to anyone dealing with a ripoff report, is to never, under any circumstance, file a rebuttal on their site. The option is there for you do to so, however it is basically an underhanded trick used by the sites moderators to enhance the Google ranking of the page further by adding yet additional user generated content to the page. This will not only cause it to be ranked higher by Google, but also more difficult to remove the report.

Additionally paying the owners of ripoffreport.com to remove a report from their site does not guarantee that it will not have already been disseminated and displayed onto other corners of the web. For over 20 years the best way to truly remove a ripoff report is to reduce the chances of anyone seeing it. This strips any of the power it may hold, and damage it may do, by placing it out of site on page 2 or below of Google and other search engines.

We have solutions in place to deal with the removal of a wide range of any and all negative reviews from an array of complaint sites, and have worked on ripoffreport removal since the early 2000s.

Please feel free to contact us for a free online review scan, or to inquire as to which of our options would best work for your specific situation.