Category Blog

McMillan Law Group in San Diego has been sued for posting fake reviews on Yelp. McMillan apparently posted several reviews from the same IP address in their office. To their defense they claim that they had invited their clients to a party at their office and asked them to leave reviews from their computers. One of their clients has publicly confirmed this.

McMillan also claims that the lawsuit has no merit and it was done as a retaliation because Yelp lost a small claims case against them over an advertising dispute.

This is not the first time Yelp is suing over fake reviews. Several months ago a company called “Buy Yelp Reviews” was sued as well, which seems to have shut down now.

Read the full story by our CEO Pierre Zarokian on Search Engine Watch.

Our CEO Pierre Zarokian has written a new article about Bing’s alleged change of heart on removing court-ordered defamatory content from its search engine. Has Bing truly changed its policy?

If your online reputation has been tainted, you know how devastating it can be to have defamatory content about you or your company featured on the web for everyone to see. Major search engines such as Google and Yahoo are usually fair about the issue. If they receive an order from the court to remove defamatory content, they usually comply by removing it from their search indexes. And up until recently that was also the case with Bing. However, leading attorney who specialize in internet defamation law are claiming that Bing has changed its policy and no longer honors court orders.

Published in SearchEngineWatch.com, the article features interviews with leading reputation management attorneys, a spokesperson from Bing, and final words on the matter by reputation management guru Pierre Zarokian. Read the full article here.

Recently Yelp held a town hall meeting and invited a few business owners to attend so they can discuss their programs and answer any questions about Yelp Advertising services. However, the meeting backfired and turned out to be a complaint forum from pissed up businesses.  The audience got aggressive with their questions and complaints on how their legit reviews get filtered. However, Yelp only wanted to discuss the benefits of their advertising services.

LA Times was there to cover the story. Read more details here.

TheDirty has lost a lawsuit against Sarah Jones who claimed damaging posts were posted on thedirty.com about her that destroyed her reputation. This is a major victory for the reputation management industry as the judge has allowed the case to go through, while thedirty had claimed immunity due to the Communication Decency Act (CDA) which protects public forums from any liability when 3rd party content is posted.  Due to the owner Nik Richie making edits to posts, the judge did not accept the CDA as a defense.  Sarah Jones had previously admitted to having sex with a minor and got 5 years probation. However, the specific damaging post on The  Dirty was prior to that incident and stated that Sarah Jones as a cheerleader for the Bangles had sex with every member of a football team. The jury awarded $388K to Sarah Jones, but collection might be a problem as Nik has stated that he is $1 million in debt and that he would never pay a penny to Jones.  The Dirty plans to appeal the case.

Our CEO Pierre Zarokian has published two articles on Search Engine Watch and Examiner about this subject:

If you are looking to completely remove posts from Pissed Consumer, this may not be easy. PissedConsumer will not remove any negative reviews unless they get a court order to do so. This means that first you need to figure out who posted the review, then sue them and if you actually win, you can request the court to order a removal. This could be a very costly method, specially if you do not know who the posted is. In which case, you would need to file a “John Doe” lawsuit and then subpena the Pissed Consumer records to get the name, IP address and email address of the poster.  If they posted from an anonymous name and email, then you need to subpena the ISP provider to get the identification of the person owning the IP address at the time of the post.

The problem is that the ISP may not have any records and even then if the person posted the review from an anonymous IP, such as from a coffee shop then you are out of luck. By the time you are done, even if successful, this could cost you upwards of $20K to $30K.

So what other options do you have? 
There are 2 remaining options:
1) Try to find the original poster and try to resolve the situation or pay them to remove the listing. Although, we are not sure if Pissed Consumer would agree, as some sites such as Ripoff Report and TheDirty will not even remove reviews even if the original poster requests it.

2) You can hire a reputation management firm like us to help you remove them. We might be able to remove the listing from Google completely or push it down to second or third page of Google so it is not visible, but we would not be able to remove it from PissedConsumer. We have some unique ways of removing things quickly and we offer 100% money back guarantee with most our services. For details, contact us by calling the number on right or filling our contact form.

Read more about our PissedConsumer Post Removal Services.