The World Wide Web has been an amazing boon to individuals, families, and businesses. It connects us and offers an incredible wealth of information, entertainment, and opportunities. Imagine what life during the coronavirus lockdowns would have been like without access to the internet and things like video conferencing. But as with all great things, there is also a dark side to the internet. A dark side that allows damaging websites like the dirty.com to exist where anyone can post a negative article on Internet and irrevocably damage a person or a business’s reputation.
What is TheDirty.com
A blogger by the name of Nik Richie began the website under the name DirtyScottsdale.com. The website initially focused on personal criticisms and venting about the city of Scottsdale and its club scene. But it quickly grew and took on a life of its own as Richie enabled users to anonymously upload their own “dirt” on first Scottsdale businesses and performers and later on anyone, including private individuals. Users could post news, accusations, photos, gossip, photos, text, and videos, with other users able to comment on them. The website changed to TheDirty.com and for a brief period, refocused to become a more traditional celebrity news site. Today, it’s gone back to that general gossip and, in fact, is commonly referred to as the “World’s Largest Gossip Website.”
But it gets even worse. The gossip and “news” posted on TheDirty.com is never cross-checked and yet, despite this, Google consistently ranks it as a highly authoritative website. What this means is that if someone is irked with you or your business, they can post anything they want onto TheDirty.com, including a picture of you or your business as well as full name, and whenever someone types your name into Google, that TheDirty.com post is apt to rank up on top.
How to Remove Yourself From TheDirty.com
TheDirty.com does have a page where individuals can request to have information about them removed from the website. However, the staff at TheDirty.com don’t consider themselves the truth police and generally won’t remove any information unless it can be proved categorically false. Unfortunately, since much of the gossip on TheDirty.com is in the form of personal opinion and stories, proving something to be false can be incredibly hard, sometimes impossible.
So if you cannot get TheDirty.com to remove posts and comments about you, then you should consider calling in a professional reputation team. An experienced team will have more extensive reputation management tools and understandings of how to approach negative articles about you online and how to get them permanently removed. Where articles cannot be removed from specific websites, such as removed from the dirty.com, a net reputation team will use other types of strategies to eliminate the possibility of searches of your name revealing those comments and posts on the website. Such strategies include appealing to search engines like Google as well as employing a burial strategy in which positive articles on the internet push negative articles so low in search engine rankings as never likely to be seen again.
For more information about these strategies or to hire a net reputation team to remove negative articles about you, contact us today.