One of the first things that comes to mind when you find negative reviews on Ripoff Report is to take them to court, especially when you find out that they will never remove the content they have on their website.

But it’s also true that they can hide behind several laws that protect them, so you may not receive the remedy you want from the judicial system. Everywhere you look online you can read complaints about users trying to get unfounded ripoff reports removed, allegedly resulting in a sort of ‘extortion’ by the site owners to join some kind of program they have. Not my words, you can do a Google search and find plenty of ticked of people screaming that the whole Ripoff Report setup is a scam to pull in memberships.

Neither here nor there. For the sake of this article let’s say you found some content over at Ripoff Report that you don’t like, they won’t take it down and now you’re considering legal action. Let’s take a look at some of the facts.

Ripoff Report has NEVER lost a case.

Yup, it’s true. Though they have settled out of court a few times and they have had a few judgments placed against them in Canada and the Caribbean for not showing up, therefore losing by default, they have never actually lost a court case. The main reason for this is a solid little law called The Communications Decency Act ( or “CDA,” : 47 USC 230). This law was not created for sites like RR, but the end result is that Ripoff Report cannot be sued for posting defamatory content written by it’s site users. If they create the content themselves, then that’s a different story. But if it’s a random internet user, they are 100% protected. ALWAYS.

**Here’s how the CDA protects website owners. I am an employee of this website, therefore Web Reputation Management is responsible for this blog post and any content I create. However, both the company and I are not responsible for the comments you write about this post in the comments below. Get it?

Ripoff Report will NEVER remove a Review

Also true. Though it has settled a few of it’s cases out of court, like with Hy Cite Corporation. The negative reports are no longer in the title tag and the report is below the fold at the bottom of the page. (Sorry, not linking to any pages in this post, but you can figure out where they are…) End result, Ripoff Report made some adjustments, though only a compromise, not complete removal.

So you are pretty much stuck with what they have there. You can pay their fees, which I have no idea what they cost. I have read stuff that claims Ripoff Report asks for $50,000 and a $1500 per month payment, but have no idea how valid these claims might be.

Ultimately, it’s going to be a lot quicker and more affordable to take your web reputation into your own hands and work on pushing that negative information from the front page of the search engine result pages. With some positive content strategically put into place you can take control of what people see about you and your company, regardless of what content there might be on Ripoff Report, or any one of the copycat websites like RR out there that allow users to write product, service, and company reviews without any validation.

You can take back the first page of Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask, and you can take back your good name. Call our office at 800-818-6286 and let us put together an online reputation management plan for you. Our services work. Give us a call today and let us show you how.