Imagine searching your company’s name on Google, only to find shopping pages hosted on unfamiliar domains, blogs you didn’t authorize, or even fake login pages that almost tricked you into clicking. This type of content misleads your customers and damages your brand’s reputation, as cybercriminals jeopardize your revenue with their scams. Clearly, you need to remove Google Search results to protect your brand.
When you takedown Google Search results that infringe on your brand, you strike back at impersonators. Google presents one search engine among many to protect your brand upon, including Baidu and Bing, and many of the tactics we’ll discuss today apply across the board. Removing search results delivers only the first step towards well-protected brands, as the scam domains still remain active. Combining tactics to remove search results with practical measures like domain suspensions with registrars creates direct action to protect your clients. In this blog, we’ll explore how you can remove harmful content from Google as part of a broader brand protection strategy.
Understanding brand threats on Google and beyond
Scammers, hackers, and opportunists all kinds of attacks and impersonations that show up in search results. Here’s a few common types of impersonation and fraud:
- Cybersquatting
Malicious actors register domain names that look similar enough to your brand to confuse customers, prospects, partners, or colleagues.
- Fake Shops
These counterfeit websites sell knockoff products or pose as your legitimate store. They either distribute fake goods, or no goods at all, misleading potential customers, siphoning legitimate revenue, and tarnishing legitimate brands.
- Paid ad infringements
Scammers also push malicious ads on trusted platforms like Google, Instagram, and YouTube, deceiving targets with the allure of respectability. When a phishing page or fake shop is only a click away, businesses must ensure they take down paid ads infringing on their brands across all paid channels.
Each of these threats can cause serious damage to your brand, lead to lost sales, and erode trust with your customers. To fight back, you need a clear strategy for removing this harmful content from. Brands remove Google Search results as a top priority because the platform represents the first port of call for many online shoppers. Along with the next steps, like cease-and-desist letters to registrars, you can remove malicious results from Google, and take down dangerous website altogether.
How to remove Google Search results: Delisting, DMCAs, and blocking tactics
When you want to remove Google Search results, Google delisting and DCMA requests present your first port of call. The search engine supports these tactics in-platform, and effective brand protection means understanding their strengths as well as their weaknesses.
Google Delisting
Google delisting helps businesses remove harmful or misleading content from search results. This process targets URLs linked to phishing pages, impersonation sites, or anything damaging your brand’s reputation.
Submitting a delisting request involves identifying harmful URLs and explaining how they violate your rights. However, Google only removes the exact URLs listed in your request, so similar pages may remain visible. Monitoring and identifying all harmful URLs is key to full protection.
For businesses, using Google delisting helps protect your online presence and maintain customer trust by removing damaging content from search visibility.
If you identify harmful content, the first step is submitting a delisting request through Google. This involves providing a detailed explanation of why the content violates your rights and specifying the URLs to be removed. Google typically processes delisting requests under DMCA guidelines, processing over 9.8 billion URLs with the legislation so far.
How Google Delistings deploy the DMCA
The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) powers effective takedowns with a robust legal precedent. These takedowns form a key component of Google delisting. Focused on intellectual property rights, the DMCA allows you to request the removal of unauthorized content, like images, text, or videos. Going through each stage of the delisting process, you’ll find the DMCA options for whether the offending URL infringes on your Copyright, Counterfeit, Defamation and Personal data. Choosing the relevant field helps you achieve an effective manual delisting.
DMCA requests work across Google platforms, including Search and YouTube, and target infringing material, whereas delisting generally addresses misleading or harmful content. By understanding how these two strategies overlap, you can better protect your brand online. Digital Millenium Copyright Act requests underpin billions of delistings, delivering the legal tools to support brands and consumers on Google. Incidentally, Google also provides a tool for removing outdated content, if you’re interested in that too. For brands that wish to report Google Search results for defamation, the search engine also provides another form to fill out and request further action.
By incorporating DMCA takedowns with other digital tactics, like registrar blocks and domain blocks, you can create a more comprehensive strategy to protect your brand online.
How to remove infringing websites with registrar takedowns and domain blocks
When it comes to removing harmful search results, registrar blocking takes a more direct approach. While Google delistings help you remove search results from appearing, but the domains that host them remain live and active. Delistings only cut the leaves and flowers from the weeds, while roots continue to spread under the soil. Brands tackle this problem with other tools like registrar takedowns and domain blocks. By focusing on the registrar, you can take down or suspend domains hosting malicious content, addressing the root cause of the problem more effectively.
Beyond that, domain blocking adds another layer to your strategy, to proactively stop malicious domains from appearing in Google Search results. Domain blocking tools like GlobalBlock help prevent registration of your domain under hundreds of global TLDs, stopping the most direct fake domain registration. This approach prevents scammers from registering infringing domains in the first place. Learn how to remove Google Search results through proactive prevention with powerful domain blocking options in our detailed guide.
Brand protection conclusions: How to remove Google search results
In this blog, we’ve covered the key strategies to remove Google Search results, including Google delistings and DMCA takedown requests. While delistings can hide harmful content from view, they leave the domain intact—addressing only the surface of the issue. Adding domain takedowns to your strategy helps remove malicious content at its source by working directly with the domain’s registrar or registry to suspend or take down the site entirely. Domain blocking goes one step further, proactively preventing bad actors from registering domains tied to your brand or renewing once they appear, removing threats at both the root and stem.
Scammers pose constant threats online, but with the right actions, you can protect your brand, safeguard your customers, and secure your revenue streams. If you’re concerned about brand impersonation or other threats on Google, consider a free brand audit to identify vulnerabilities and take control of your digital presence.
