[snake_plissken]

How does this work exactly?

1) A blogger publishes an article warning about scammer/fraudster/terrorist known as person Person X. They publish on January 1 2024.

2) Person X wants to get this info out of the Google results.

3) Person X goes to one one of these reputation management companies. They copy verbatim the article and post it to Tumblr. Tumblr has a feature to back-date posts so they back-date their post to December 1 2023. This makes it appear like the content appeared before the blogger published their article.

4) The reputation management company then sends a DCMA takedown notice to Google with the Tumblr post as evidence that the blogger is infringing on their content. Google does their DCMA thing and de-indexes the blog post.

The blog poster's remedy is to appeal the takedown at which point Google would then re-list their post...at which point this process starts over again?

Stuff like this is incredibly frustrating. It's so simple yet effective because of how the DCMA compliance process is implemented.