Guide hub Content removal: who published it decides what comes down

You found five pages carrying the same story and you're about to send five copies of the same letter. Every one of those sites decides for itself what comes down, and the five policies have nothing in common. A mugshot site takes a court order. A news desk takes a correction. A federal press office takes neither. Sort the list by who published each page before you write anything, because that's what decides your route.

What comes down, and what doesn't

Two of these publishers will delete a page and three of them won't. A mugshot site removes the whole record when your court paperwork matches its list, and a web host will pull an imposter page. A news outlet corrects the story and leaves it up at the same URL. A federal press office publishes no removal process at all, so the realistic win there is an appended correction note or a de-index. Google's tools take a result out of search and never touch the page itself.

What it costs you to do alone

Every request on this page is free to send, and the price you pay is evenings. Mugshots.com answers in ten business days, BustedNewspaper gives you day 10, a JailBase opt-out runs 90 days, and a Justice Department webmaster may never answer at all. Each one is a separate letter in that site's own format, plus a trip to the clerk's counter for certified paperwork, plus a re-check after every site says it acted. The one route with a real price on it is a UDRP filing at $1,500, and that's for a domain, not a page.

The mistake that looks like failure

Sending one request, in one format, to every site on your list. Google's exploitative-sites form comes back denied on a mugshot site that charges nothing, because that policy requires the site to demand payment. A Justice Department correction request waits 120 calendar days for a refusal, because press releases are exempt by name. A critical Reddit thread reported as harassment gets denied, because that rule doesn't shield public figures from criticism. Four denials in a row read like the whole thing is impossible. They mean four wrong forms.

Build one list, then sort it by who published each page

Search your full name in quotes, then your name with your city, then your name with the charge or the company. Go to page two, because that's where the sites you've never heard of live, and switch to the Images tab, since a booking photo ranks there separately from the page carrying it. Copy every URL into one list before you write to anybody.

Then drop each URL into one of five buckets, because the bucket is the route: mugshot and booking sites, news outlets, government press offices, forums like Reddit, and imposter sites pretending to be you or your business. The bucket decides who you write to, what you send, and whether anything comes down at all.

Work the buckets in the order below, not in the order Google ranked them. The mugshot sites publish real routes with real outcomes, so they clear first and they clear fastest. The government pages have no process anybody can invoke, so they sit at the bottom where a slow answer costs you nothing.

Get the paperwork before you open a single form

Most of these routes open on one document and close without it. Mugshots.com wants a court document signed by a judge, sealed by the court, and legible, all three. BustedNewspaper takes legal documentation of an expunged, dismissed, nol prossed, not guilty or sealed case, and says a letter from your attorney is accepted too. A news desk moves on a docket entry, a dismissal or a vacatur order, and never on your account of what happened.

Pay the clerk for the certified copy before you file anything, because a docket printout off the county website isn't judge-signed and court-sealed, and that's the most common reason a good case gets refused. Scan it clean and keep it under 3 MB, which is BustedNewspaper's cap. Mugshots.com discards a document it can't read and sends no notification, so a bad scan looks exactly like a denial and you never learn which one it was.

If the case is still open or the conviction stands, most of these doors aren't open to you yet. BustedNewspaper's reason menu has four values and no other option. Mugshots.com removes for six situations only. Finish the sealing or the expungement with a lawyer first and then come back, because the order is what makes the requests work rather than what makes them unnecessary.

Mugshot sites first, because they publish real routes

These are the fastest wins on your list and every one of them is free. Mugshots.com runs entirely on email, with two addresses doing different jobs: one takes the record down, the other only adds your disposition to a page that stays live. BustedNewspaper has a single hidden form that accepts four dispositions and nothing else. JailBase was 404ing on every page when we checked on September 8, 2026, so there the job today is clearing the leftover Google result rather than filing an opt-out you can't reach.

If anybody asks you to pay, screenshot the demand before you do anything else. Six states put a removal deadline on the website itself: Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Oregon, Wyoming and Utah. Five more make the fee illegal without ever ordering a takedown: Arizona, California, Missouri, Virginia and Illinois. The state you were arrested in is the state whose law you use, and which of those two lists it's on decides whether you're mailing a letter or hiring a lawyer.

File them in parallel and put each site's clock on a calendar the day you send it: ten business days at Mugshots.com, day 10 at BustedNewspaper, 90 days on a JailBase opt-out. A site that never answers is a no. Write it down as a no instead of leaving it open, because re-checking it every Tuesday for six months is the real cost of doing this alone.

News desks: ask for the correction, not the takedown

Google won't pull a live news story and there's no form for asking, so the page moves only after the outlet moves. Write to the corrections desk with three things: the exact URL, the sentence quoted word for word, and a primary document that contradicts it. Describing the article instead of pasting its link gets you a form reply.

Ask for the smallest change that fixes the search result, and name it: a correction, an editor's note, a follow-up covering how the case actually ended, or your name off a routine crime brief. Opening with take it down gets refused as a category and spends the one exchange you get, and a lawyer's demand letter does the same damage faster by turning an editorial question into a legal one. What you're realistically getting is a corrected story at the same URL, which is what a published corrections log looks like when it works.

If the story is false, check your state's clock today, because California's runs 20 days. That path is a lawyer's job and it's the only one in this bucket with a real price attached, so find out where the deadline sits before you spend two weeks writing letters.

Government press releases: no process, so you're writing to a person

Neither the Justice Department nor the FBI publishes a removal process, a deadline or an appeal. Open the release and watch the address bar first, because an fbi.gov URL that lands on justice.gov belongs to a U.S. Attorney's office and the FBI can't edit it. For an IRS release, read the status code before anything else: as of September 2026 the oldest one still live is from August 2021, and if yours already returns Page Not Found, one free Google request clears the stale result.

Email the district office that published the page, attach a certified copy of the order that changed the facts, and include the exact URL, the headline and the date. Ask for a correction note appended to the page or a name redaction, because those are the only asks that sit inside a webmaster's ordinary editing authority. Neither Justice Department web form takes an attachment and both cap you at 2,000 characters, so the form can't carry your order and isn't meant to.

Skip the Information Quality Act correction request that nearly every other page on this subject recommends. The exemption list names press releases, so you'd wait 120 calendar days for a refusal that never opens your document. Plan for a non-answer here: there's no service standard and nobody above the office to escalate to, which is exactly why these pages belong at the bottom of your list.

Reddit and imposter sites, then Google, last on every one

Reddit removes content that breaks one of its eight rules, plus copyright material, and there's no rule against a thread being unfair to you. Message the subreddit's moderators, because they can remove anything inside their own community and they're the fastest lever on an ordinary bad thread. Report to Reddit itself only where a rule was actually broken, and know that a removal leaves the URL alive either way.

For an imposter site, report it to the host before the registrar, because a host can pull one page while a registrar acts on the whole domain or not at all. The registrar's abuse definition is a closed list of malware, botnets, phishing, pharming and spam, so a clone that copies your look and steals nothing isn't the registrar's job. Send that one to the host as a copyright complaint, or to UDRP, which is the only route that hands you the domain.

Then tell Google, and do it last on every page you've actually moved. The Refresh Outdated Content tool is built for a page that has already changed, and a page that's gone can hold its ranking for weeks while Google gets around to re-crawling it. Skip that step and you'll swear the removal didn't work.

What none of this moves, and what to do instead

A true story that a real outlet stands behind isn't coming down, and nobody can sell you the takedown of one. A justice.gov page is a press office's decision and there's no procedure anyone can invoke on your behalf. On the mugshot sites a dismissal or an acquittal usually buys an update rather than a removal, and the policy says so plainly: the page, the photo and the URL all stay live with your disposition displayed on them.

Google's tools de-index, they don't delete. The result leaves search, the page sits exactly where it was for anyone holding the link, and an approved outdated-content request expires once 180 days have passed. None of it reaches the sheriff's roster, the court file, or the wire copy somebody syndicated the morning the story ran.

Where a page has no route, the work stops being removal and becomes building accurate material that outranks it. We'll tell you which of those two situations each URL is in before you pay for anything, because it changes what you should buy.

One story, five publishers, five different letters.

Send the free requests yourself today, because the mugshot sites and the corrections desks are one sitting each. When the same story is sitting on eight URLs, Content Removal is $499 to $1,999 per case, priced by what each host site's own policy allows. We find the copies you haven't found yet, file each one in that publisher's own format, chase the replies, and send you a written status on every URL. Where a page won't move, we build and rank the pages that take its place on your name.

Have us do it.

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Written by Drew Chapin, who ran all of this on his own name first.

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