With the rise of technology over the years, people now have the ability to post anything on the Internet. While this has been great for some to share information, entertaining content, and more, it is also the channel for individuals to post items aimed to offend, hurt, or defame other people or even damage businesses. 

If you ever find content targeted at you that is damaging your reputation or company, however, have peace of mind knowing that you can do something about it and remove that content.

In this article, we’ll give you four ways you can get damaging online content removed:

Perhaps the most effective way to remove content is to ask the author themselves to remove it from their sites. Generally, this option may not always work. They posted it there for a reason, whether it is to defame you or damage your business as retaliation or perhaps another reason.

However, it is still worth a try, and there are a few tactics you can use to up your chances of success. For example, you can face it altruistically, acknowledging that they have the right to post something, but then pointing it out to have it removed. 

If you think that talking to the author is a bad idea, you can always speak to the webmaster to have it removed. However, this will only apply if they're different people. Nevertheless, if the company that owns a site is medium-sized, they're likely two separate individuals. 

Legal removal requests allow you to remove all kinds of illegal content that are aimed at you. Requesting against illegal and defamatory material will allow you to remove sexually explicit material that you didn't consent to, as well as a myriad of other dangerous and unlawful content, such as copyrighted information.

When you submit a legal removal request to Google, they'll analyze the content to see if it is genuinely illegal and whether it violated their terms of service. During this time, the link where the false information is found might become inaccessible. When they deem it illegal, then they'll get rid of the link entirely.

However, be aware that the URL to the link will still be in their servers for transparency purposes and for any officials to go back to investigate what was removed. If you were part of illegal activity, this means that you won't be off the hook entirely.

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If you live in Europe by any chance, you'll have something called "The Right to Be Forgotten." As the name implies, this gives European citizens the right to have search engines like Google remove any search results that show any damaging or illegal content against a user. Unfortunately, this doesn't remove the content from the Internet. Instead, it just removes the link to it. This means that people can still access it if they have the means to do so. However, for that to happen, you'll need to most likely resort to the legal removal request instead.

If you find content posted online that's damaging to yourself or your company, you are well within your rights to have it removed. The solutions given above are imperfect because some might remove the link, while others will leave a notice that the content has been taken down. 

In such circumstances, you can opt to utilise online content removal services by third-party companies. They're committed to having negative content about you or anything else to be removed, and you'll be offered a customised solution that'll ensure peace of mind knowing that any damaging online content will no longer be found.

If you’re looking for an online content removal service, get in touch with us to see how we can help.