Today we discovered that RipoffReport.com has been completely deindexed by Google. We have searched online for any news about this and so far there is only one other person reporting on this news on Twitter. We have confirmed we several others that are seeing the same thing.
When you search for “Site:ripoffreport.com” no pages from Ripoffreport are showing. There is however a message stating:
“In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at ChillingEffects.org.”
This could been there is some kind of copyright infringement notice against them. However, what does not make sense is why is the whole website gone and not only the pages that infringe upon someone’s copyright!
Back in 2001, a similar thing happened. Search Engine Watch reported on it and it turned out the Ripoff Report webmaster had accidentally gotten the site deindexed using Webmaster Tools.
We think this removal is temporary, but let’s hope it is gone forever as it will make a lot of people happy!
UPDATE!
The outage only lasted a couple of hours. The pages are all back in Google now! We may never know what happened!
